Bull

The economic slowdown didn’t hit Edifice Construction’s revenues last year as sales climbed to $46 million from $36 million in 2000, according to principal Chris Bull.

But 70 percent of the Seattle firm’s work involves constructing tenant improvements for retail and office spaces. That market has now slowed dramatically. Bull, the firm’s vice president for business development, said the firm expects revenues to come in at about $30 million this year.

Edifice’s employee total of about 90 has held fairly steady so far, “but we may have some layoffs if things don’t pick up a bit,” Bull said.

“The tenant improvement market just died, as we all know. The dot-gones just pulled out,” Bull said.

Photo courtesy of Edifice Construction One of Edifice’s recent jobs included a tenant improvement for Seattle Packaging.

In response, the firm is looking for more tenant improvement work in schools, churches and public buildings, and trying to land more jobs building, or remodeling, large houses.

Constructing high-end homes has been generating about 30 percent of the firm’s revenues. The recession appears to have turned people away from replacing houses with mega-homes to remodeling their existing homes instead, Bull said.

“We’re seeing the mega-houses scaled back, but a larger remodel market,” he said. “There had been a lot of knock-downs.”

The recession makes more subcontractors hungry for work, compared to two years ago, when they turned away offers. Interest rates also remain low. Both place downward pressure on remodeling costs, Bull said.

However, most of the area’s easy-to-build water-view lots are built out, leaving steeper-sloped ones to choose from, he said. That places an upward pressure on prices.

The firm has three large house construction projects on its plate for this year, one that will cost $4 million, the other two about $3 million.

One is two adjoining single-family units on an “extreme slope” facing Lake Washington, Bull said. Another is close to a landslide zone in West Seattle’s Alki area.

“We do a lot of special concrete foundations and shoring for extreme slopes. One thing we’ve found is we can apply some of our commercial practices to (big) residential jobs,” Bull said.

On the commercial side, the firm built out the inside of a new Nordstrom store in Orem, Ore., which Bull identified as the firm’s largest project last year. The firm also provided tenant improvements for the new downtown Seattle office skyscraper called 1700 Seventh that houses Nordstrom’s headquarters.

Edifice provided Seattle Packaging’s tenant improvements in the box maker’s consolidation from several facilities into one. Edifice also provided tenant improvement work for the Mithun architecture firm when it moved into the second floor of Pier 56.