2007 was the year when the few big contractors got even bigger and the many small ones became so many more. Of all landscape contractors in Sweden only 10% have more than 10 employees and the real stronghold of the business are the many one- and two men businesses. It is also there that the growing power is strongest, at the real small and the real big contractors. The traditional, well-established medium-sized landscapers have really difficult to compete on maintenance, but on hard landscaping they still retain the number 1 position in the country.

Especially profitable today are the smaller ?hard landscaping? jobs, in the range of 10000 ? 200000 ?. 2007 was also the year when more general contractors sought to subcontract more work, especially when it comes to continous maintenance tasks on public green spaces, i e mowing the lawns, empyting paper baskets and other tasks with a high manual labor factor. At the same time we have noticed an increasing number of firms having access to ?cheap labor?, partly from abroad and partly of domestic origin. Cheap labor for maintenance works now run for 11-15 ? per hour excluding VAT when bought from these cheap firms. The average landscape contractor normally sells this kind of work for around 20 ? per hour.

Among the public authorities, the resistance against outsourcing grounds maintenance is becoming less and less, partly due to that they want to retain only such work themselves that have an external market price of about the same size as their own self-cost. Another reason is off course that the politicians feel much stronger for education, social care and other publicly financed departments, compared to public green spaces and that maintenance and other facility services often contain a high degree of variable costs making it attractive as to bring quick results in the budget.

Those cities and municipalities who have the most part of their own staff doing qualified maintenance and special hard landscaping instead of doing just about everything themselves might be seen as the 300-club-strategists here. Where the market price is low and competition strong, they outsource the work, mostly for 3-5 years and it is only the large corporations and facility management companies who stand an actual chance to take on the big, public contracts.

Generally these general-contractors will then retain between 1/3 and 2/3 of the workload in their own operations and subcontract between 1/3 and 2/3. The cheaper the price tag is, the more will be subcontracted. Best value is always used for evaluation and the mix could be around 60% price, 15% quality and experiences, 15% organization and capacities and 10% environmental questions.


Claes-Anders
Malmberg
is a consultant who works for the landscape industry. He has written several
tutorial books for landscapers and public authorities on grounds maintenance and
landscape management. More information on his homepage

where there is an english section aswell as a main
Swedish homepage.