September 26, 2016

Building boom has been a real lift for Mayfield's Hoisting Service

Photos by Benjamin Minnick [enlarge]

Taylor W. Mayfield, left, is preparing to hand off the company in a few years to his son, Taylor A. Mayfield.

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Mayfield’s Hoisting Service recently set up this tower crane at Yesler Terrace for Vulcan Real Estate.

Rider Levett Bucknall's July crane index shows there are 58 fixed cranes at work in Seattle today, a nearly 50 percent increase over the past year.

This booming construction market is good news for Taylor Mayfield, owner of Mayfield's Hoisting Service in Lynnwood. His company provides cranes, operators, riggers, signalers and other related services. It works with Morrow and Northwest Tower Crane Service.

Mayfield said he has 14 active jobs now and eight more set to start by the end of the year. Things are so busy that when a crane comes down at one job, it goes right back up at another.

“They are a commodity right now — they are very much so,” he said.

Mayfield said there is no shortage of cranes, but there is a shortage of reliable cranes that are backed by good service. “In the construction business, the crane is the heart of the job,” he said. “It can make or break a company.”

Earlier this month, Mayfield set up a tower crane at 123 Broadway in Yesler Terrace for a project called Batik that is being developed by Vulcan Real Estate. Batik will have 195 units of market-rate and workforce apartments. Exxel Pacific is the general contractor and Runberg Architecture Group is the designer.

Mayfield also installed a tower crane nearby at Seattle Housing Authority's 111-unit Hoa Mai Gardens, south of Yesler Community Center. The team on that job is led by Andersen Construction and SMR Architects.

Next March, Mayfield will be back at Yesler Terrace to install a crane for SHA's 130-unit Red Cedar project at the corner of Ninth Avenue and Fir Street. Andersen Construction will also build these apartments, which were designed by SRG Partnership and Pyatok Architecture + Urban Design.

Another upcoming installation is for the new Children and Family Justice Center in Seattle's Squire Park neighborhood. Mayfield said that crane will go up Dec. 19 for Howard S. Wright, a Balfour Beatty company.

Seattle isn't Mayfield's only market. The company has two cranes working on the Eastside now and Mayfield said they'll add six more by year end, including two next month at the 618-unit Hyde Square, an apartment project being developed by Carmel Partners at 156th Avenue Northeast and Northeast 20th Street in Bellevue.

Mayfield said he typically has a signed lease agreement six months before a crane is needed.

Mayfield started the company in 1996, but said he closed it from 2002 to 2014 after a divorce. During that time he worked as a union crane operator, and said the closure spared him from the Great Recession. When he reopened in 2014, he said business “picked up right where it left off.”

Mayfield said he got a big boost last year when general contractor Exxel Pacific hired him for an apartment project in Lynnwood's City Center development. Now Exxel is using Mayfield on four jobs and is his biggest client.

Restarting the business has gone well, Mayfield said, with many of his original clients coming back.

He said knowing his employees well allows him to pick the best person for each job. For example, some operators may be good at lifting steel beams while others excel at jockeying concrete buckets.

There's also a company policy that requires the person who starts a job to be the one to finish it.

“It's an asset to the contractor to have them start and finish it,” Mayfield said, because most jobs have about a three-month learning curve.

Mayfield, who said his father was a crane operator, is planning to retire in four or five years and his son, also named Taylor, will take over the business. The younger Mayfield joined the company about a year ago after working for the operators' union for eight years, and as an apprentice at Ness & Campbell Crane.

The elder Mayfield said he expects crane demand in the private sector to remain strong for several years. “They don't see an end to this,” he said.

Next up? Mayfield wants to supply cranes and operators for the Washington Convention Center expansion that Lease Crutcher Lewis and Clark Construction will build, and Sea-Tac Airport's north satellite terminal expansion, which has Hensel Phelps as GC/CM.