While new commercial construction volume in Springfield has improved year-over-year, it’s still a long way from prerecession levels.
Local industry professionals point to relationships as a pivotal factor helping contractors get jobs as the industry waits for its rebound.
Rick Quint, founder and president of Q & Co. LLC, said there are plenty of factors, including price, safety records and personnel, that go into a project owner’s selection of a general contractor.
Q & Co. recently wrapped up construction of a roughly $14 million, 275,000-square-foot facility in Strafford for John Deere Reman, but that wasn’t Quint’s first time to work with the company.
Prior to opening Q & Co. in 2010, Quint ran a local office for Kansas City-based Walton Construction and led the design-build process – and, later, an addition – for a facility that was a joint venture between Springfield ReManufacturing Corp. and John Deere on Mustard Way in Springfield’s Partnership Industrial Center.
“I personally had a past experience with them, as well as my superintendent Bruce Johnson. And I think that probably played into our favor, because we knew the personnel and they knew our personnel,” Quint said, noting his company was one of several from the Ozarks and elsewhere who were considered for the Strafford job.
Paul Brown, facilities and maintenance manager at John Deere Reman, said the company sent a request for quotes to five contractors, including Q & Co. He said each contractor made a presentation to a panel, for which Brown was one of five members. Each was rated on several areas: qualifications, costs, past experience, extra effort and initiative, and experience with design-build construction and with a team of architects, engineers and subcontractors.
After scores were tallied, Brown said he and the other panel members voted, and Q & Co. got the job. Brown noted that his previous encounters with Quint – and other Q & Co. employees that previously were at Walton – could have given the company an edge.
“I had personal experience with them, and I’ve had personal experience with other contractors, and that does influence your vote,” Brown said, adding John Deere Reman’s original project with Quint in 1998 came after company leaders inquired and learned that Quint’s Walton team had built several other buildings in Partnership Industrial Center.
As commercial construction ramps up, it’s likely to be those relationships that bring jobs to contractors, though some project owners will bring their own contractors to town with them to build, according to King Coltrin, president of the Springfield Contractors Association.
“As far as [projects] like the Walmarts, they pretty much bring their own people, so usually that work’s not available to the local contracting community, anyway,” Coltrin said. “A lot of them have contractors that they’ve worked with in the past, and they’ll work with them unless the price is just way out of line. They develop a team and try to keep their team together.”
Even if local builds go to out-of-town contractors or materials – such as Italian tile or non-native stone – are specified for a project, there is still work for local firms, Quint said.
“A general contractor today probably does less than 5 percent of the work; 95 percent of the project is really specialty contractors. I don’t like using the word subcontractors – they’re specialty contractors, and we have some really good specialty contractors in this area that are very capable of doing large portions of work,” Quint said. “It wouldn’t matter who the [general] contractor is, but the people who actually ... lay the carpet, lay the tile and put the stone in the building, that’s where the local guys come in.”
Even with subcontractors, parceling out those jobs comes down to relationships, Quint said.
“When we subcontract out portions of the work, there’s a lot of risk in doing that,” he added. “What I lean on is those who I can really trust – those who are financially sound (and) have good staff. You can have the best contractor in name, but if the staff who created that name are not there, you don’t have anything.”
More jobs on the way? Local commercial construction seems to be on the rise in Springfield, according to building permit data from the city of Springfield. Year-to-date through June, there were 499 building permits filed in the city, with 211 of them issued for commercial additions, renovations and new construction. That’s up just slightly from 200 for the same period in 2011, but new commercial construction in particular seems to be a bright spot, as permits for that type of job nearly doubled to 40 year-to-date, up from 21 filed during the first six months of 2011. For all of 2011, the city logged 903 building permits, according to city data. By comparison, past Springfield Business Journal coverage shows that more than 1,500 building permits were filed in the city in 2007.
“To put a big headline on the front of the paper that we’re back – we’re not, I don’t believe, anywhere near that,” Coltrin said.
He maintains that some large construction projects, such as Wal-Mart Stores’ four Neighborhood Markets – with two finished and two under way – and the CVS Pharmacy under construction at the intersection of Campbell Avenue and Battlefield Road, would likely have happened regardless of economic conditions because those companies were ready to grow in this market. As a result, he said it can be hard to pinpoint whether current permit volumes are a sign of overall market recovery.
“How many things are being driven by the actual uptick in the economy – boy, that’s a really tough job (to) figure out,” Coltrin said. “I think the contractors in our organization are optimistic that things are going to get better, but they realize that it’s still a very fragile economy, and it would not take much to slow it down.”
Market realities If that optimism is correct and construction activity picks up, project developers will face an industry that’s much changed as a result of the economic downturn.
“There’s a little more activity this year than there was last year, but at the same time, the work-force pool is less than it was a few years ago. People say, ‘Well, are the contractors busy?’ Well, yes, the contractors are busy, because there aren’t as many contractors as there used to be. Therefore, the amount of work to get them to busy doesn’t have to be nearly as much,” Coltrin said.
Even those companies that have survived aren’t left unscathed, Quint said, noting most contracting firms are short-staffed as a result of making necessary cutbacks and sacrifices.
“We’ve learned to work with less, and I feel like right now, there’s a lot of people who are strained. They do a good job with what they’ve got, but to get any bigger, one of two things have got to happen. They’ve got to get more people, or somebody’s going to have to pay a whole lot of people overtime,” Quint said. “Something’s got to give.”
Quint said his company, which has 16 employees, is wrapping up its transfer of John Deere Reman storage racks to the new site from the old location at Pythian and Chestnut Expressway, and the company in late June finished renovating two warehouse buildings comprising 220,000 square feet at the former Solo Cup plant on North Glenstone for property owner Warren Davis Properties and NewStream, which now has operations there.
Quint said there likely will be other work for Q & Co. at Solo, where some 700,000 square feet remains available.
“Every other day, we’re playing with some idea over there,” he said.
While he’d like for local construction projects to stay with area contractors, Quint knows that doesn’t always happen, and he said his 16 years with Walton – a nonlocal-based firm – taught him that when it comes down to it, less than 1 percent of project costs actually leave town with an out-of-town builder.
As a result of relationships he formed while at Walton, Quint said his company is now negotiating a contract and lining up subcontractors for a project in St. Louis, and he said he’s open to work elsewhere, too.
“We’re just getting started, and if Deere was to call tomorrow and say, ‘Hey, we’ve got something in Iowa,’ we surely would entertain the opportunity,” Quint said.[[In-content Ad]]
