Open the board this morning and count the trades. Out of 429 live solicitations, 244 of them — better than half — carry no trade label at all. Another 19 are dumped into a generic "General Construction" bucket. That leaves a long tail of specific, useful categories (HVAC/Mechanical, Elevator, Facade/Restoration, traffic signals) each holding a handful of jobs, while the bulk of the board is just "Unspecified."

This isn't new. The prior cycle showed 432 open bids with 260 unlabeled — so the total board shrank by three jobs, but the share sitting in the dark barely moved, from 60% unspecified to 57%. That's not a data glitch you wait out. That's the normal condition of this board.

“If your electrical search looks thin today, it's not because the work isn't there. It's because nobody tagged it.”

Here's what it means for you if you're running estimating hours against a filter. If you search the board by trade — plumbing, electrical, roofing — you are seeing a fraction of what's actually out there. The rest is sitting behind agency-specific titles that never got sorted: a name like "Contract 47477C" or "Bridge repair — structural concrete, FRP wrap, structural steel" that tells you plenty if you read it, but nothing if you're filtering by category.

The agencies with the fattest chunk of that shapeless middle are the usual mid-size and rural bodies — counties, towns, small authorities — that don't run the kind of structured procurement portal NYCHA or the SCA does. NYCHA still posts a clean 17 open contracts, MTA NYC Transit another 15, State University Construction Fund 8. Those show up cleanly by agency even when the trade field goes blank.

So what do you do with a board that's half fog? Don't trust the trade filter alone. If you do electrical or HVAC work and the filtered count looks thin, that's very likely undercounting — read titles, not just tags, especially anything posted by a county, a town, or a school district. The agencies posting clean trade data are worth bookmarking; the ones that aren't are where a competitor with patience finds work nobody else bid on.