Scan the open-bid board today and 346 packages are live across the state. Most of them are what you'd expect — an agency posted a solicitation, plain and simple. But look closely at the agency column and 38 of them don't name an agency at all. They read 'Sub via' — a prime contractor is the one doing the asking.

That's about one in nine open postings right now. McLaughlin Construction Corp. has six live sub-bid packages posted through us alone. Carver Construction and Iannelli Construction each have two apiece. The rest — Howell, Bellows, Bette & Cring, Northland, Lancaster Development, PAC Associates, Patterson-Stevens, Murnane, Preferred Construction, MLB Construction Services, Kubricky-Jointa Lime, Harrison and Burrowes, Pike Construction, American Contracting & Environmental, Rocon, Thoma Development, Vernon Construction, Andron Construction, Constructomics, Lanmark Group, and HDR — are running one apiece, working down a sub list on a job they already won as prime.

“One in nine open postings on our board right now isn't an agency's bid — it's a GC's shopping list for subs.”

This is the part of the market that never shows up on an agency's own bid calendar, because it isn't the agency's bid anymore. It's the layer underneath. A GC that landed a NYSDOT bridge job or a DASNY-financed CUNY contract now needs a paving sub, an electrical sub, a masonry sub to actually build it. The agency-facing decision already happened months ago — this posting is where the sub work gets found.

A couple of names are worth watching for a different reason. Lanmark Group is running sub-bid packages tied to CUNY-CUCF, NYC DDC, and DASNY-CUNY at the same time — three postings, one prime, three institutional owners. That's a firm building a multi-agency GC book all at once, and every one of those packages is a door for a sub trying to get into that book early.

If you're a sub shop watching the big agency portals and nothing else, you're missing roughly 11% of what's actually open on our board right now — and that slice is exactly where a smaller shop without agency prequalification can still get in the door. Watch the 'Sub via' tag, not just the agency name.