Pull the open-bids board today and count the trade tags. Four hundred forty-six jobs are live across the tri-state region right now. Two hundred eighty-one of them — 63% — carry no trade at all. Just "Unspecified."

That's not a rounding error. That's nearly two out of every three postings on the board today where a contractor scanning for HVAC work, or electrical, or paving, has no way to filter this job out or in without opening it and reading the scope by hand.

“If your trade isn't showing enough hits, stop trusting the filter — the job you want might be sitting in the untagged two-thirds.”

Compare that to the trades that DO get tagged: General Construction shows up 24 times, Construction Related Services 16 times, Construction/Construction Services 15 times, HVAC/Mechanical 6 times, Plumbing 6 times. Add up every named trade category on the board and you get maybe 165 postings — a little more than a third of the total. The rest is a black box.

This has been the case for weeks now, and it's not getting better. Yesterday's board also ran 60-ish percent unspecified. So this isn't a data-entry backlog that's about to clear — it's a structural gap in how these postings get scraped and tagged at the source, whether that's an agency's own portal metadata or the aggregator layer sitting on top of it.

Here's what it means on a Tuesday morning: if you're an electrical sub running a saved search for "electrical" jobs, you are missing most of what's actually out there. The board shows 5 postings tagged Electrical. It's a safe bet there are more electrical scopes buried inside those 281 blank entries — a mechanical systems package here, a fit-out with a heavy electrical line item there — and you'll never see them unless you're willing to open every single untagged listing.

The agencies breaking that pattern are instructive. NYCHA runs 18 open postings and most of its recent work — elevator, plumbing, electrical — comes through tagged. SUNY runs 16 open postings, also mostly named by trade. Contrast that with the pile of one-off municipalities, counties, and small authorities feeding into the "Unspecified" bucket — a lot of small-town DPW and village jobs where nobody bothered, or nobody could, categorize the scope on the way in.

So what do you do with that today? If your trade isn't showing enough hits, stop trusting the filter. Scan the raw feed, not the category view, at least once a week — the job you want might be sitting in that untagged 63%, invisible to everyone running the same search you are. The gap is real, it's persistent, and right now it's an edge for whoever's willing to read past the tag.