Florida
On a Florida Podium, the Ground Floor Is the Schedule
Everything above the transfer slab is fast and repetitive. Everything below it is slow, wet and full of unknowns — which is exactly why we self-perform the dewatering and the support of excavation rather than subcontracting the two items most likely to stop your job.
Bring the site, the unit count and the drawings at whatever stage. You get a range, the drivers, and an honest read on the pro forma.
Self-perform
Dewatering, SOE and deep foundations in house
Licensed
General contractor, licensed in the state of Florida
GMP
Open book, with the contingency visible to you
Draws
Documentation your lender can actually process
What we build
What we build
Six typologies. The structural system and the parking decide most of the budget.
Garden Apartments
Two to three story wood frame with surface parking. The cheapest way to build a unit in Florida, and it only works where land is cheap enough to spread out.
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Wrap & Texas Donut
Residential wrapped around a freestanding parking structure. More density than garden without the cost of building over the parking.
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Podium
Concrete parking and ground-floor uses below, wood-framed residential above. The workhorse of urban multifamily, and the typology where Florida ground conditions bite hardest.
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Mid-Rise Concrete
Cast-in-place or precast concrete throughout. More expensive per square foot than wood and often the right answer anyway — particularly near the water.
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Mixed-Use
Ground-floor commercial with residential above. Structurally one building, operationally two, and the complexity lives in the seam between them.
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Adaptive Reuse
Office, hotel or warehouse converted to residential. Occasionally excellent value and frequently more expensive than building new, and the difference is decided by the existing structure.
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The commercial terms
The commercial terms
Contract structure, contingency, draws and escalation decide the return more than finishes do.
GMP & Contract Structure
A guaranteed maximum price is the standard structure for multifamily, and how it is assembled matters more than the number on the front.
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Lender Draws
Your lender is a stakeholder in the program whether or not anyone treats them as one. A draw that gets rejected costs you a month of carry.
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Contingency
Contingency is not padding and it is not free money. It is a bounded provision for things nobody could reasonably have known, and it should be governed as such.
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Schedule Risk
On a multifamily deal a month of delay costs carry plus a month of deferred lease-up, and that combination is usually larger than any construction saving anyone negotiated.
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Material Escalation
Between pricing and buying, materials move. Somebody carries that, and the contract should say who rather than leaving it to be argued.
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The difference
What a developer should actually care about
We self-perform the part that kills Florida schedules
Dewatering and support of excavation are the two items most likely to stop a Florida podium job, and most general contractors subcontract both. When the water is the problem, the people solving it work for the same contract you do.
Your lender is a stakeholder and we treat them like one
Draw packages that get rejected cost you a month of carry. We build them to what the lender actually needs — stored materials documented, lien waivers current, percentages that reconcile — because a clean draw is a schedule item.
The contingency is visible, not hidden in the number
On a GMP the contingency should be a line you can see, with a stated process for drawing against it. A GMP with the contingency buried in the trades is a number designed to look competitive at award and behave differently afterwards.
We will tell you the pro forma is wrong before we bid it
If the construction budget in your model cannot buy the building in the drawings, the honest time to say so is at entitlement, not at bid. Everybody who says it later is either padding or gambling.
Start here
Request a preconstruction budget
Bring the site, the unit count and the drawings at whatever stage they exist. You get a range, the real cost drivers, and an honest read on whether the pro forma works.
If the construction budget in your model cannot buy the building in the drawings, we will say so now rather than at bid.
FAQ
Common questions
- When should we involve you?
- At entitlement or early design development. By bid, the cost decisions have all been made without cost information.
- Do you self-perform?
- Dewatering, support of excavation and deep foundations. On a Florida podium these are the largest schedule risk.
- Where should the contingency sit?
- As a visible line with a written drawdown process. Buried in the trades it cannot be tracked.
- Why do draws get rejected?
- Lien waivers, undocumented stored materials, and percentages that do not reconcile. Boring and avoidable, and the carry lands on you.
- What causes most schedule delay?
- Permitting and below-grade conditions, then long-lead equipment. Rarely the framing.
- Who carries material escalation?
- It should be explicit — shared with a threshold and a cap is usually the honest answer.
- Is conversion cheaper than new build?
- Frequently not, once structure and code triggers are counted. Test-fit the floor plate first.
- Will you price without a geotechnical report?
- Not the below-grade scope. It would be a guess that becomes a change order.
Service area
Where we work
- Counties covered
- Broward · Miami-Dade · Palm Beach · Collier · Lee · Monroe · Martin · St. Lucie
- Office hours
- Mon–Fri 10:00 AM – 6:00 PMPreconstruction from entitlement, not from bid. That is where cost is still cheap to change.
- Phone
- (954) 807-3208
Read our Google reviews — worth a look before you let anyone on your building.
No showroom, and that is deliberate
Romco is a service-area contractor. There is no trade counter to visit, because the work happens at your building rather than at ours.
Outside the immediate Broward and Palm Beach corridor we work through established local trade partners and manage the project ourselves. You deal with one point of accountability either way — the crew on site changes, the person answering for the job does not.
For anything urgent, call(954) 807-3208 rather than using the form. We would rather look at it than quote it blind.
Next step
Find out what is actually wrong with it.
An inspection, photographs of what we found, and a written scope. If the honest answer is that it can wait another season, that is the answer you will get.