Recently, Engineering-News Record (ENR)—a publication often referred to as the “bible” of the construction industry—published its Sourcebook for 2015 (subscription needed for link). The results show that the U.S. construction industry is generally moving in the right direction. ENR Sourcebook supplements the initial Top 400 list, which is published in June.

Slow but steady growth seems to be the overall market tempo, according to ENR.

As a whole, ENR described 2014 (the source year for its 2015 rankings) as a “pretty good year” that saw contracting revenue increasing 2.4% from 2013 to a sum total of $331.94 billion for the Top 400 U.S. builders. In addition to the rankings, the ENR Sourcebook offers a wealth of industry insight and analysis on the growth drivers, market movements and current challenges facing our industry. Among the trends this year: Doing more with less.

In its analysis of the booming office sector, ENR quoted DPR’s Mike Ford who noted that the strong cycle in the office market sector is expected to continue for at least three years. “All of our [geographic] markets in office are strong right now,” Ford said. Last year, DPR more than doubled its national revenues in the commercial office market from the year prior, thanks to a boom in that sector and supported by our expertise in helping clients meet and exceed their green and sustainable building needs, among other things.

For DPR’s part, we continue a multi-year trend of being ranked among the top five to ten percent or so of U.S. construction firms by overall volume on the ENR’s annual Top 400 Contractors List. Holding steady with the year prior, in 2015 we again came in at spot #21, backed by $2.66 billion in 2014 revenue.

DPR also was ranked on a number of market specific sub-lists that were called out within both the ENR 2015 Sourcebook and the Top 400 list. Among these, we were ranked:

• #3 in Pharmaceuticals
• #6 in Data Centers
• #7 in Commercial Office
• #8 in Healthcare
• #8 in Telecommunications
• #9 in Aerospace
• #11 in Green Building Contractors
• #16 on the Top 50 contractors by volume in the General Building category
• #18 in Industrial Process
• #20 in Hotels, Motels, and Convention Centers
• #32 in Manufacturing

While ENR’s annual Sourcebook offers a chance to “check out the numbers," at DPR, we understand that our most important measures of success include how satisfied our clients are, how predictable our project outcomes are, and how much we are pushing our project practices “ever forward.”

Our 25 year anniversary offers the chance to reflect not just on all the projects we've delivered since 1990 (as shown in the image below)—but more significantly, how we continuously work to create and sustain highly satisfied customers along the way.

*This blog post is part of a series that celebrates DPR's silver anniversary and focuses on 25 great things from the company from over 25 years. Here's the last one. Follow #DPR25 on social media to learn more.