Could contractors soon source more than just machines from rental firms?

That’s according to the CEO of a major US rental company, who sees digitalisation driving a shift in the market as contractors struggle to source skilled workers, finance, and materials.

Scott Cannon is CEO of BigRentz, which has built a network of 14,000 rental yards and 6,000 rental companies in its network across the USA. BigRentz partners with these companies and advertises online to travelling contractors or large service companies that use technicians across the country so that they can book to rent equipment from local companies that they might not otherwise have known about.

Recently the company started a new partnership with finance provider Billd, which like BigRentz, mainly serves subcontractors.

Cannon suggested that this was the next step in rental companies offering an increasing number of services to construction companies that go beyond simply hiring out machines.

“There’s tremendous financial pressure put on subcontractors by the length of time it takes to get paid and juggling from one job to the next,” he said.

“That has an impact in a downflow for companies like us, where we have subcontractors that have a hard time paying their bills, or don’t have the credit worthiness to extend terms.”

He added that as the rental sector moved further into the digital space, companies would start to offer more solutions to contractors in one location.

Digital offering to respond to jobsite challenges

“What are the big challenges on jobsites? You need to have money to do the work. You need a piece of equipment, an operator, a technician or a tradesman, and materials. So long term, what I would see is the consolidation of those things into a platform to basically make it easier for contractors to do their job,” he told Construction Briefing’s sister publication Rental Briefing.

He suggested that with “tailwinds” in the US market and significant government money going into infrastructure projects over the next few years, rental penetration would continue to grow because it “just makes sense [for contractors] not to own equipment”.

He added that the construction industry faces a range of broader issues too, such as finding appropriately skilled tradesmen. “There are lots of folks retiring in the next 15 years, and there’s a gap where everybody was told to go to college and didn’t learn how to work trades. That’s really going to put a strain on our industry. And material costs have been a really big variable over the last couple of years.

“We’re trying to be a solution for our companies. They need to get materials, they need to get equipment, and they need to get tradesmen. If you look at it together, I would say we’re looking to offer a bundle of jobsite services.”

Cannon said the company has spent two years and millions of dollars working on a new internal platform that is set for release within the next couple of months.

“After that, we see an opportunity to possibly release that same platform to end customers. It would be the world’s first procurement rental platform,” he said.

“Nobody has ever designed anything like what we have. It’s early days but we are leveraging all the information we have accumulated [from 60,000 to 70,000 rentals per year] to use in a pretty interesting way.

“There are a lot of ideas that just weren’t there five, six years ago and I think part of it is just getting through covid. Everybody’s lives got disrupted and it amplified the world’s desire to get whatever you want at the click of a button.”

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