Those include a shortage of skilled-trades laborers meaning fewer projects can start, a slower economy overall and increasing costs of materials and the labor shortage driving up project budgets, construction experts said.

"In a broad sense, the construction industry expansion has been in place for some time now," said Robert Murray, chief economist and vice president for Dodge Data. "To some extent, it is an expansion reaching its later stages, and to some extent it is a result of higher material costs and a labor shortage."

He noted that the Dodge data is calculated by including a total project cost when a permit is filed. That means that large projects for which permits were issued in 2018, for example, had their total value included in 2018's data. That means work should carry over from last year into 2019, but start tapering off by 2020 with a 5 percent slowdown nationally.

"Also what we are seeing is a more cautious lending stance toward the real estate development sector," Murray said. "There is concern nationally that multifamily housing has been overbuilt."

To be sure, in downtown Detroit alone, dozens of vacant buildings have been renovated and reoccupied, or constructed as the city's and region's economy have rebounded. Go to the suburbs, and you'll find countless more examples that the building industry has had a good post-recession run.

Ron Staley, senior vice president of The Christman Co., a Lansing-based construction firm whose Detroit office is in the Fisher Building in the New Center area, said the construction surge has felt a bit like it might have a century ago.

"My thought always was, 'Wouldn't it have been cool to be in Detroit in the 1920s when everything was crazy with the train station and the Book Tower and the Fisher Building being built?' " Staley said.

"I think we are really living in that same environment. The wealth is not nearly the same and not all driven by the auto industry, but the projects that are getting done are all those same buildings in a major way, buildings that were done a century ago."

But not all in the industry felt the construction surge.

Peter Burton, principal of Bingham Farms-based developer Burton-Katzman LLC, said some industrial tenants remain reluctant to pony up for the higher-than-normal rents needed to justify new buildings.

And that comes as the region's existing industrial product ages into obsolescence.

"New industrial buildings, in order to make sense, your rents are going to be in the $8 to $10 per square foot range, while tenants are used to paying $4 to $5 per square foot," Burton said.

"By my measure, 2018 was not the best year ever. It was a good year, but it was nothing compared to 2007-08-09, the years right before the recession."