Czech contractors are the big winners from this year’s unusually mild winter. Not only did work on residential projects and commercial buildings barely slow down between November and February, but infrastructure projects will be able to get underway sooner than anticipated. The specialist portal Nejřemeslníci.cz confirmed this with its own data. “The year-on-year growth in realized orders was also clear as the numbers were very similar to a strong autumn season,” says the site’s director Martin Ekrt. “The year-on-year growth was more than 19 percent. It was mostly reconstruction projects and new family homes that usually don’t get underway until the beginning of spring. His website, in which people can find trades specialists to do jobs, brokers around CZK 1bn in orders per year. Metrostav’s spokesman Vojtěch Kostiha said the warmer weather helped it with its road and rail projects. “We hardly had to stop work at all this winter,” he said. Ironically, hotter weather in the summer is more problematic for contractors, he said, because while heat waves can interfere with work and lead to delays, the law does not count them as natural disasters.
