What we build · Mixed-Use
Two Buildings Sharing a Structure
Ground-floor commercial with residential above. Structurally one building, operationally two, and the complexity lives in the seam between them.
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
Two occupancies, two timelines
The residential and the commercial have different code requirements, different MEP, different fire separation, different acoustic needs and — critically — different delivery dates. Retail tenants need shell space early enough to fit out before residents move in, and coordinating those two schedules is most of the job.
The leasing timeline is the other conflict. Retail tenants sign at different points and each wants their space at a different time, while the residential above needs to complete as a whole. Sequencing shell handover to individual retail tenants around a single residential completion is most of the program complexity.
What has to be resolved early
- Occupancy separation, which drives structure and MEP.
- Separate utility services and metering for each use.
- Acoustic separation between a restaurant and the units above it.
- Grease, exhaust and refuse routing if food service is contemplated.
- Delivery sequence — shell to retail tenants before residential occupancy.
Deciding about food service early
Grease waste, kitchen exhaust and make-up air all have to be routed through or past residential floors to reach roof level. Providing those routes during construction costs comparatively little; adding them to a completed building is disruptive and sometimes not possible at all.
The decision therefore has to be made before the structure is designed, on the basis of what the retail might become rather than what the first tenant happens to be.
How we handle it
- 01Coordinate the two occupancies at design rather than at inspection.
- 02Design services separation and metering properly.
- 03Route restaurant infrastructure early — it cannot be added later.
- 04Sequence delivery so tenants can fit out ahead of residents.
- 05Manage two sets of inspections and two certificates of occupancy.
Decide whether food service is possible before the structure is designed. Grease waste, kitchen exhaust and make-up air have to be routed through the residential floors, and retrofitting that is either extraordinarily expensive or simply not possible.
Said plainly
Where we stop
If the retail program is undefined at design, we will flag that the structure is being fixed before the use is known. That is a real risk and it should be an explicit decision rather than a drift.
FAQ
Common questions
- Can restaurants go in later?
- Only if grease and exhaust routing was designed in. Retrofitting through residential floors is often impossible.
- How do the schedules interact?
- Retail shell has to deliver early enough for tenant fit-out before residential occupancy.
- Separate utilities?
- Yes, separately serviced and metered. It is a design decision, not an afterthought.
- What about noise from below?
- Acoustic separation designed at the start. It is effectively unfixable afterwards and it drives residential turnover.
The terms
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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More what we build
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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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.