Three hundred sixty-one public construction bids are open across New York right now, and if you tried to search that list by trade, you'd miss more than half of it. The RFI Wire's own tally of the active board, pulled September 7, shows 206 of those 361 postings carry no trade tag at all. They just say "Unspecified."

The labeled slice breaks down fast. General Construction leads with 37 open jobs. Construction Related Services holds 15. Plumbing and PM/Consulting each sit at seven. Paving/Sitework has six. After that, the list turns into a long tail — more than 40 separate trade categories with exactly one open job apiece. Masonry: one. Fencing: one. Glazing: one. Windows: one. Flooring: one. Demolition: one. If you're a glazier scanning this board for work today, there's exactly one job on it with your name on the label.

“If you're a glazier scanning this board for work today, there's exactly one job on it with your name on the label.”

Here's the thing — that doesn't mean there's only one glazing job out there. It means the agencies posting these bids don't tag the trade consistently, so a curtain-wall repair might land under "General Construction," under "Facade/Restoration," or under nothing at all. Think of it like a phone book where half the businesses forgot to list a category. The work is in there. You just have to open every listing to find it.

That's a real cost for a small, M/WBE-certified shop that doesn't have staff to read 361 postings a week. A one-person electrical outfit filtering by "Electrical" finds five jobs. The sixth one might be sitting three lines down, tagged "Unspecified," with an electrical scope buried in the spec where a trade filter will never catch it.

So don't trust the trade filter alone this week. Scan the full board by agency and by keyword — conduit, curtain wall, roof, tile — not just by category, and open the Unspecified pile before you skip past it. That's where a good chunk of this week's work is actually hiding.