The open-bid board lost ground overnight. Four hundred sixty packages were live yesterday morning; today it's 454 — a net drop of six, the first pullback after a run of growth days this desk has been tracking all week.
Here's the thing about a net number, though: it hides more than it shows. A board doesn't shrink because nothing new got posted — NYCHA alone still carries 27 open packages, MTA Construction & Development has 11, and OPWDD has 16 scattered across its DDSO campuses. What's happening is bid dates are closing faster than new ones are landing, at least for one day. That's a calendar quirk, not a slowdown — watch it for a few more cycles before calling it a trend.
“If you only search this board by trade, you're missing more than half of it today.”
The number that actually matters is the trade tag problem, and it got worse, not better. Two hundred forty-seven of the board's 454 open bids — 54% — carry no trade classification at all, just "Unspecified." Yesterday it was 239 of 460, or 52%. So even as the total board shrank, the untagged pile grew both in count and in share.
If you're a sub trying to filter this board for HVAC work or electrical work, more than half of what's posted right now won't show up in that search. You have to read the project title and guess, or open every listing. General Construction is the only trade with real volume showing a clean tag — 21 open bids — and Flooring holds steady at 12. Everything else is scattered in ones and twos across labels so specific they're basically project descriptions: "Bridge repair — structural concrete, FRP wrap, structural steel" is one bid's entire trade tag.
None of this is a knock on any one agency — plenty of these postings come through PDFs and portals that were never built to carry a clean trade field, and translating that into a searchable tag is grunt work nobody gets paid for. But if you're an estimator who only searches by trade, you are missing more than half the live board today. Until that gets fixed, plan on searching by agency and keyword both, every time — the untagged half isn't going away on its own.