Three things decide who wins work

Lili C. August 20, 2026

Timing first. Across our tracker, the median project becomes publicly visible 148 days before its expected tender: a board agenda, a land deal, a financing filing. Five months in which the client can be met, the brief understood, the relationship built. The firm that first hears of a project in the RFP portal is five months late, and usually competing against someone who was not.

Warm beats cold. The cheapest project you will ever win comes from a client you already have. The moment an existing client starts something new (files for land, closes financing, appears on an agenda) is the single highest-value signal in business development, and most firms have no systematic way of hearing it. Watching your own clients is worth more than any volume of cold outreach.

Watch the winners. Who just got appointed, on what, by whom: your competitors’ wins are a map of where the market is actually buying, drawn weekly, in public records. The firms that read that map position for the next project on the list; everyone else finds out at the award notice.

22,446 open projects on the live map, up 5,032 this window.

View the full pipeline

• Housing: 7,411 open projects
• Infrastructure: 7,012
• Health & education: 5,248
• Civic & culture: 3,383
• Workplace & commercial: 1,119

Reading this week

• “We overhauled the Empire State Building”: retrofit lessons from the team that did it (Global Construction Review)
• UNESCO inscribes 13 Alvar Aalto works as a World Heritage Site (Architectural Record)
• SimpsonHaugh cuts five storeys off the rejected Manchester tower to win approval (Architects’ Journal)
• Spanish firm wins the $304M Rosarito desalination plant in Baja California (ENR)

Upcoming events

• EAAE Annual Conference and General Meeting, Cagliari, 26-29.08.2026 · starts 2026-08-26 (www.eaae.eu)
• 12th International Conference on Architecture, Materials and Construction (ICAMC 2026) · starts 2026-09-02 (www.clocate.com)
• eCAADe 2026 Pre‑Conference Workshops · starts 2026-09-07 (www.ecaade.org)

AI in practice

• Organisations seeing real returns from agentic AI are empowering staff, not cutting them (Workplace Insight)
• “Where do I start with AI?”: a working answer for design practices (BD Online)
• AI in preconstruction: rewiring the process beats raw speed (ConstructConnect)
• 36% of contractor members now fly drones on jobsites (Construction Executive) If something here helped, or something is missing, just hit reply. I read everything.

See you around,

Shicong, DataDrivenAEC