REPORT: North American Crane Counts Reach a New Peak

Residential high-rise construction continues to dominate over other all other sectors, according to the January 2018 issue of the North American Crane Index®.  Mixed-use and commercial developments follow the lead at twenty-six and twelve percent, respectively.

“The North American crane count has reached a new peak,” notes Julian Anderson, President of Rider Levett Bucknall North America.  “The increase in net crane count this survey points to a construction market that not only merely holding steady, but prospering.”

It is anticipated that this growth will continue through 2018.

Nearly eighty-five percent of counts indicate that surveyed cities are either holding steady or demonstrating construction growth in their respective regions.  Among these, Toronto, Seattle, Chicago, and Los Angeles lead North America with the number of cranes decorating their skylines, employing over half of the total count.

Click here for the latest edition of the North American RLB Crane Index.

About the North American RLB Crane Index

Rider Levett Bucknall’s North American RLB Crane Index® is published biannually and currently tracks the number of cranes in use in 13 major cities across the U.S. and Canada. Unlike other industry barometers that track cost and other financial data, the Crane Index tracks the number of fixed cranes on construction sites and gives a simplified measure of the current state of the construction industry’s workload in each location. Index cities include Austin, Boston, Calgary, Chicago, Denver, Honolulu, Los Angeles, New York, Phoenix, Portland, San Francisco, Seattle, Toronto, and Washington, D.C.