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By Greg Bartlett

About $5 billion worth of construction equipment is stolen from construction sites every year. The reason for this may be that building materials and construction equipment are often left at the site unprotected at night. These items are easy targets for thieves because they are fairly easy to steal and will get them a big profit.

However, some construction companies are fighting back. Construction companies can take measures to protect their equipment and supplies without removing them from the job site every evening after they finish working. GPS tracking systems attached to the pieces of equipment that are the most expensive and the most likely to be stolen might not prevent the items from being stolen, but it will make it simple to track those items back down.

This method has proved useful recently for a home building company in Texas that had two air conditioning systems stolen off of the job site. Each system was worth about $2,000, making them a high profit item for thieves. However, the company had hidden GPS tracking systems in the air condition units. This allowed them to track the devices in real time. The home building company used the geo-fencing capabilities of the GPS tracking systems to alert them when the air conditioning units were removed from the job site.

The recovery of their air conditioning units saved the company the cost of buying two additional units. Although having a handful of real time GPS tracking systems on hand for tracking all of your expensive equipment sounds expensive, in this case it saved the company $4,000.

It is obviously not possible to track all of your equipment and building supplies with their own GPS tracking device, but careful selection and placement can protect your most expensive pieces of machinery. Although it is possible that someone would steal a pile of lumber from your job site, it is not the most likely target. Thieves are going to go after your heavy machinery or items such as pricy air conditioners that you are about to install into the home.

Most likely, if a theft occurs, one of your tracked items will be stolen along with various other things. This single GPS tracker could lead you to all of the stolen goods. This makes it easy to protect almost all of your supplies and equipment with just a few trackers. Buying a couple of trackers for a few pieces of equipment is not too expensive when compared to the amount of money that it could save you in the case of a theft.