What Hiring Activity Tells You That Market Reports Do Not
I spend most of my working hours talking to facilities and construction leaders: people who are in active searches, people who are considering a move, people who just accepted a role, and people who are hiring. Taken individually, those conversations are about specific roles and specific people. Taken together, they are a real-time read on what is happening in the institutional facilities and construction leadership market in ways that no published report captures with the same timeliness or granularity.
Over time, I have come to pay close attention to the patterns in those conversations. Where are experienced leaders moving? Which organizations are searching frequently? What titles are hardest to fill right now? What is driving people to leave roles they have held for years? The answers to those questions, read carefully, tell hiring leaders something useful about the environment they are operating in before that information shows up in formal market data.
Here is what I am seeing in 2026, and what I think it means for organizations that are hiring or planning to hire facilities and construction leadership.
Signal One: The Volume of Passive Candidate Outreach Responses Is Up
Earlier in my career, reaching out to a senior facilities or construction leader who was not actively looking for a new role and getting a meaningful response required either a strong pre-existing relationship or a very compelling opportunity. Over the past eighteen months, that dynamic has shifted. Passive candidates, people who by every visible measure are settled in their current roles, are responding to outreach more readily than I have seen in a long time.
This is not because the market has deteriorated and people are anxious. In most cases, it is the opposite. The leaders responding to outreach are doing well and they know it. What has changed is their openness to conversation. The retirement wave has created visible movement at the top of their organizations. They are watching peers make transitions. They are at a career stage where a well-timed lateral move or step-up opportunity has real appeal. And in institutional environments specifically, where promotion opportunities can be slow to materialize, the window for a move that advances their career is narrower than it might appear from the outside.
What this means for hiring organizations: the candidate you want for a senior facilities or construction role may not be applying anywhere. But they will take a call from the right person with the right opportunity. The organizations that understand this invest in a search process that reaches passive candidates directly rather than waiting for the right resume to arrive through a job posting.
Signal Two: Owners’ Rep Firms Are Pulling Hard from the Institutional Side
One of the clearest patterns I have observed over the past two years is the sustained movement of experienced facilities and construction leaders from institutional employer-side roles, primarily higher education and healthcare, into owners’ rep firms. The firms doing the pulling are names like JLL, STV, Colliers, Macro, Group PMX, and Sodexo, along with a range of regional and boutique owners’ rep practices that have grown significantly as capital program volumes have increased.
The draw is compensation, primarily. A Senior Project Manager or Project Executive at an owners’ rep firm can earn meaningfully more than a comparable role on the institutional owner side, and the portfolio of projects is often more varied. For a facilities or construction leader who has spent fifteen years managing capital programs at a university or health system, the owners’ rep path offers both a financial step-up and a new professional challenge.
The implication for institutions is significant. The candidate pool for owner-side Director of Construction and VP of Facilities roles is not just competing with similar roles at other institutions. It is also competing with owners’ rep firms that have both the compensation flexibility and the business development incentive to recruit aggressively from institutional rosters. Institutions that have not updated their compensation benchmarks recently are often operating with salary ranges that were competitive three years ago but are not competitive now. That gap is part of what is making certain owner-side searches difficult to close.
Signal Three: The Superintendent Shortage Is Becoming a Project Executive Problem
I have written before about the shortage of experienced institutional superintendents. That shortage is now creating a secondary problem that I am starting to see more clearly in searches: there is a thinner pipeline of Project Executives on the owner side who have strong field experience. The Project Executives who understand a capital program not just from the owner’s perspective but from the perspective of someone who has actually built in complex institutional environments are increasingly hard to find.
Part of this is generational. The cohort of owner-side Project Executives who came up through field experience in the 1990s and early 2000s is approaching or at retirement age. The generation behind them came of age in a construction market where field experience was less common in institutional project management career paths. The result is that when institutions search for a Project Executive with genuine field depth, the candidate pool is narrower than the title alone would suggest.
This is showing up in search timelines. Searches for Project Executives with specific field experience in institutional construction are taking longer to close than searches for more administratively oriented project management roles, even when the compensation is competitive. Institutions that are planning capital programs two or three years out should be thinking about this talent constraint now, not when the program is already underway.
Signal Four: Retention Risk Is Highest in the Two-to-Five Year Tenure Band
When I talk to facilities and construction leaders who have recently made moves, a disproportionate number of them left roles they had held for two to five years. Not one year, where the departure might suggest a poor fit. Not ten years, where institutional loyalty and seniority create stickiness. Two to five years: long enough to have delivered something meaningful, short enough to still have significant career runway.
What typically triggers the departure at that tenure mark is the absence of a clear next step internally. The leader has done what they were hired to do. They have delivered the capital program, stabilized the operations, built the team. But the organization’s succession planning has not kept pace with their development, and when an outside opportunity surfaces that offers a title advancement or a scope expansion that the current organization cannot match, the decision is not difficult.
This is a retention problem that institutions can address proactively, but most do not. A VP of Facilities or Director of Construction who is three years into a role and delivering well is not thinking about leaving today. They will think about it when they receive an outreach call from someone like me with a compelling opportunity. If the internal path is unclear, that conversation is going to be competitive. Institutions that build explicit succession frameworks and communicate them clearly to their high-performing facilities and construction leaders retain them at a much higher rate than institutions that assume tenure and current satisfaction are sufficient retention tools.
What I Would Tell a Hiring Leader Today
If you are planning to hire a senior facilities or construction leader in the next twelve months, do not wait until the role is vacant or the program is in crisis. The market for experienced institutional talent is competitive and the search timelines are real. Starting the search process, or at least the search planning process, before urgency is acute gives you options that you will not have once the clock is running.
And if you are managing a high-performing leader in the two-to-five year tenure window, have the career conversation now. Not when they are already talking to someone else. The cost of that conversation, even if it requires some organizational transparency about succession planning, is a fraction of the cost of losing someone you invested years in developing.
If you want to talk through what the market looks like for a specific role or a specific sector, I am glad to have that conversation. You can reach me and the Real8 Group team at real8group.com/contact, learn more about how we work at real8group.com/how-we-work, or meet our team at real8group.com/team.
Real8 Group is a specialized executive search firm serving the real estate, construction, engineering, and facilities operations sectors across the U.S.
