The commencement of work on the new King Edward VII Memorial Hospital building and Waterloo House in Hamilton will help to stave off what would have been an “apocalyptic depression” for the construction industry last year.That is the view of Alex DeCouto, president of Greymane Contracting and former president of the Construction Association of Bermuda, who said that the projects by themselves would not cause a ‘boom' and relatively few firms would benefit from them, while the rest of the industry would be looking for property owners to make continued investments.“Unfortunately I think funding will be scarce, as the banks remain bearish on lending generally,” he said. “The big projects will skew the Department of Statistics' numbers but I think that employment will remain static.“Any firms not involved in the aforementioned big projects will have to be very aggressive on pricing, and even lucky, to make it through this year.Mr DeCouto said that there had been whiffs of potential with one or two of the big hotels, but he had grown tired of being optimistic about such projects, added to which, with the recent report about losses in the tourism industry, financing was nigh on impossible to secure.“My own hopes and aspirations, as one of the firms who isn't involved in the ‘big' projects, is to remain in business this year,” he said. “I think that was my hope for last year too.“We spent the whole of 2010 living quarter to quarter, unable to see any further ahead. Small and medium-sized projects eventually came, and we had to price/tender very aggressively to ensure we secured the turnover we needed.“I anticipate that I will be doing much of the same this year; hoping that the projects will eventually come up for tender, that we get invited to bid, and that we price them right.”