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Engineering News-Record and Architectural Record Each Win 2002 Jesse H. Neal Awards

McGraw-Hill Construction Information Group Publications Recognized for Editorial Excellence in Business Journalism

Spring/Summer 2001
pg. 27

Construction.com "Get To Work"
New Media 50 - Rank #6

CUSTOMER SERVICING: Even if you don't know a rivet from a lock washer, two minutes at McGraw-Hill's Construction.com will have you rolling up your sleeves and grabbing a hammer. If the B2B Web dream is to move part of the workplace online, to let industries conduct their everyday chores on this faster-cheaper- better-organized medium, then more sites should look and feel like this one, far and away the most popular destination for the commercial building industry.

Serious work goes on at Construction.com, from managing projects and bids to soliciting quotes, tracking leads and buying plans. Sure, legendary resources like project tracker F.W. Dodge, product guide Sweet's, and Engineering News-Record are online, but interoper-ability and real-time updating also supercharge them.

The key is understanding that the Web does not revolutionize a business that will forever take place in the field. "It's not a cataclysmic change that drives the industry," says Norbert Young, president, McGraw-Hill Construction Information Group. "We made a con-scious decision to stay close to the customers and the way they do their jobs today."

ON BUDGET: With a half million projects and 60,000 products in the databases, this thing is the Chunnel of sites, but without the overruns. While it draws from thousands of worldwide contacts and a catalog of McGraw-Hill commercial building titles, the Construction.com hub is manned by an efficient crew of 30, led by Judy Schriener, editorial director; Don Berry, sales director and Brian Tonry, business development head. Already profitable three years in, the site has seven (count'em) productive revenue streams, from online subscriptions to ad client services, print subscriptions to application sales. Roughly one third of the Construction Group's revenue comes from the Web.

ZONED FOR GROWTH: The potential for growth is staggering. Construction-related spending accounts for up to 8% of the national GDP, yet the industry is incredibly fragmented into more than a mil-lion owners, developers, subcontractors and manufacturers that need better ways of finding one another to coordinate these complex building projects.

"If there is any industry that is ripe for the Web, this is it," says Young. Nevertheless, the sector is far from office-bound (have you ever tried to get your contractor on the phone?), and much of it is comprised of small businesses that communicate via cell phone (lots of them) and fax machines.

Construction.com already pulls an impressive 350,000 unique users a month, but that is a fraction of what McGraw-Hill expects. "It will take three to five years," says Young. You mean all this is just the frame?

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