4 June 2025
RICS – Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors
Our CEO and lead Project Manager Mark Lawson is a member of RICS (Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors) and always contributes to the quarterly RICS Global Construction Monitor. The survey assesses the health of the Construction Industry and the report is very useful for investors, as well as companies in the construction industry and related industries, to predict future trends and plan for any downturns or increasing demand.
To help you tap into this rich seam of information and insight, we’re pulling out the main points for you in this article.
The Global Picture
The last few years have seen a real boom in construction, but this survey suggests a slight slowdown, compared to previous quarters. This is certainly not a downturn, RICS refer to it simply as “decelerating growth across the industry”, adding that “twelve-month expectations for workloads are still positive across all sectors at the worldwide aggregate level”.
The survey measures not only project volumes or workloads, but also how people are feeling about the market. Known as the Construction Sentiment Index, this showed a dip globally, but with significant regional variation. For example, Asia Pacific went negative, from +11 to -5, whereas Europe actually increased, from +6 to +11 and Middle East and Africa are at +31.
The US is seeing a cooling in the pace of growth, and there’s negativity in Canada, probably linked to Trump’s stance on trade. China and Hong Kong are down too, reporting insufficient demand.
Twelve-month workload expectations, while still positive, have been trimmed across all sectors and geographical areas although infrastructure appears more resilient. The strongest growth globally is being seen in Middle East and Africa, with Asia Pacific struggling. The market impediments that are most commonly cited across the board are financial constraints, including changes in the lending climate, as well as materials costs, which the respondents predict will rise further and skill shortages
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Europe
Drilling down to look at Europe, the picture is more positive than the global average with a modest improvement felt by respondents compared to Q4 last year. There has been a small increase in positivity in terms of the current conditions and twelve-month expectations. Of course, Europe is an area with a lot of regional variety, but overall, it’s looking positive. France was a country with very poor Construction Sentiment, at -35, and the UK and Italy are also pretty low. As with the global picture, infrastructure was the strongest sector with energy and ICT being the most important areas. Private residential sector saw a mild improvement across Europe, particularly showing growth in Spain, Ireland and Italy. In fact, when we look at workload expectations, all sectors are displaying signs of growth for the next 12 months and employee levels are expected to rise. However, a note of caution is that there are expectations that margins could be coming under renewed pressure in the coming 12 months.
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