Vox pop: are you feeling the pinch?

Banks keep telling me things are slow, and now the lawyer, but as a business we have not seen it. Business is very buoyant.

I hear certain subcontractors are beginning to cut rates. One gang of bricklayers reported that they had been promised a certain amount of money by one of the major housebuilders but had had their rates reduced.

We have not taken any protective steps yet, but I have been advised to sit down with the bank and negotiate. We have an overdraft facility which we rarely use. However, overdrafts are repayable on demand and I have heard of firms who have been asked to pay up, or offer more security on the borrowing.

Daniel Fincham, Alltask

The only effect of the so-called credit crunch is that developers and housebuilders are slowing down and in many cases selling their sites/dvelopmentsnow at a discounted price rather than carry on and take a bigger write down in years/days to come. It’s all in the light of experience from the last big recession when that didn't take place and companies had enormous write downs in years two and three. New private sector work is slowing to a halt with only rock solid deals going ahead. This is still frustrated by the supply chain who are giving us inflated prices and not helping.

The action we are taking is to move from the private sector to the public or public-backed areas such as schools colleges, student accommodation etc. There is still enough volume running through this year but a look at next shows it to be a bit sparse.

Vaughan Burnand, Shepherd Construction

We have a good order book at this moment, but new jobs are taking longer to get to site and subcontractors becoming a little keener in their pricing.

We are trying to make sure we are ahead of the curve winning work, tightening up on overhead expenditure where we can and only working for credit worthy customers.

Mark Beard, Beard

Our workload has dropped off. There’s a bit of a squeeze in terms of speculative work. We are trying to change direction to counter that. We are trying to move a bit more up-market where there’s more money. There seems to be a lot of hotel work coming on which I suspect is to do with the Olympics (most of our work is in London).

I haven’t noticed any difference in the way main contractors are paying us. Those that pay us well, pay us well. A lot more subcontractors have wised up now and are more knowledgeable than the main contractors. Although the directors [of the main contractors] are quite clever and quite smart that doesn’t always translate down the line.

Steve Medhurst, WB Simpson & Sons

We have seen a change in attitudes, mainly in the housing sector. It is well documented that developers are trying to squeeze subbies to drop their prices even for work already invoiced.

We also have one instance where a developer has requested we retender for a contract despite having already given us an order.

We wrote to all the developers that contacted us requesting a 5% discount on outstanding invoices saying that this was not acceptable and that we could help them make savings through more efficient tendering processes. We offered to meet them to tell them how we could achieve this. Not one has responded to our offer.

Fortunately our exposure to fluctuations in the housing market is not as critical as it was two years ago. At that time we knew that the bubble would burst at some stage so we took the commercial decision to focus more on commercial, civils and infrastructure works. This has proved to be a good move as it has enabled us to ride any peaks and troughs in the housing sector.

Other ways of limiting our exposure is to credit check every client before we do any work. Poor credit – no work, or we ask for a percentage deposit of usually 75%.

Vic Handley, Van Elle

We are not experiencing any effect at this time from the credit crunch. If anything we are looking at a 25% increase in work load.

Mike Smith, Corniche Builders