July 28–In the Short North. At Port Columbus. Near Ohio State University. All over town, new hotels are in the works or are under construction.

Hotel construction is up nationally, too, by 10.5 percent in June, compared with the previous year, according to STR Pipeline Report. Growth is happening here, but at a slower rate, according to a local expert.

“It’s slow and steady, nothing like the market cycle we saw before the recession,” said Eric Belfrage, a hotel specialist with commercial real-estate firm CB Richard Ellis in Columbus.

Back then, he said, “We would see a 5 percent supply growth in a year, which was a pretty heavy number,” he said. “Now, we’re probably at about 2 to 3 percent growth.”

New Projects include Le Meridien Columbus, The Joseph, a boutique hotel in the Short North; a Fairfield Inn & Suites at the airport, expected to be completed in the spring of 2014; and the possibility of two new hotels near Ohio State University.

There are currently about 24,800 hotel rooms in the Columbus area, Belfrage said, with the possibility of an additional 2,500 over the next few years if all of the 20 or so proposed projects he is tracking are built.

Among the top 10 markets nationally, New York has the most rooms under construction, about 11,000, a 34.6 percent increase over the previous year.

All these new rooms won’t lead to lower rates, said Jan Freitag, an STR senior vice president. The organization tracks supply-and-demand data for the hotel industry and provides market share analysis.

“Economics 101 says that if you add supply, guests have more choice and the price goes down,” Freitag said.

But supply has yet to catch up to demand. “Many of the new hotels are upper-level properties, and everyone else is saying we can increase our new rates a bit as long as we keep them below these new rate leaders.”

Belfrage believes this national trend holds water in Columbus.

“The properties being built here are mid- to upper-scale, like the new Downtown Hilton,” he said.

On the job

Helped by hotel construction and several other industry segments, construction unemployment fell below 10 percent in June for the first time since 2008, according to the Associated General Contractors of America.The rate was 9.8 percent, compared with 12.8 percent the previous June.Construction jobs totaled

5.8 million.”But employment is still down by one-quarter from the peak of more than seven years ago,” Ken Simonson, the association’s chief economist, said in a statement. “Many of those laid-off workers have left the industry, whether for employment elsewhere, more education or retirements,” Simonson said, “and construction companies face a looming worker shortage.”

The colors of construction

The ceilings of the massive tower under construction at OhioHealth Riverside Methodist Hospital are covered with thousands of splashes of blue, green, yellow, orange and white.

And each color covers a notch in the concrete of the $321 million Neuroscience Institute, which is being built with several of the latest construction techniques.

“Everything was designed three-dimensionally and digitally,” said Doug Scholl, Riverside’s director of project design and construction.

After the concrete was poured and the formwork was removed, thousands of notches were exposed.

“The notches are already there, so we don’t have to drill,” Scholl said, then pointed to the orange patches of color. “That’s where they insert the threaded rod hangers that will hold up the water pipes.”

This notch-and-color system has hastened the construction process for Turner Whiting Construction Co., which also has subcontractors building duct systems and patient bathrooms offsite that are then hoisted into place and attached using the color codes.

There are thousands of these colors on each floor, and each and every one can be found with a GPS tracking system.

The blue notches are for ducts, the green for medical lines, the yellow for heating and air-conditioning pipes, the orange for water lines and the white for electrical lines.

With the help of these advanced construction techniques, the tower is expected to be completed in the summer of 2015.

“It’s hard to say exactly how much time this helps us save,” Scholl said. “I’d say a few months, but what it also means is less people working on the job site, so we can do everything else faster and safer.”

swartenberg@dispatch.com

@stevewartenberg