Hathaway(lowQ_pages)

US

Winter 2010

Developers Journal www.usdevelopersjournal.com

Hathaway Construction Building a Reputation of Excellence

THE MAGAZINE FOR CONSTRUCTION EXECUTIVES

Building a Reputation of Excellence Produced by Victor Martins & Written by Molly Cohen David Hathaway, a banker with experience in real estate finance, began Hathaway Properties Inc. in 1988 when he began doing development work in Macon, Ga. He started in single-family home development and construction, but felt the early ’90s required a niche change, so Hathaway directed resources toward multi-family properties and has continued down that path ever since.

As Hathaway’s work area expanded throughout the Southeast region of the United States – eventually

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including Alabama, Florida, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina and Tennessee – the office moved to Atlanta, and David’s son Daniel joined the company as a project manager, working his way to president of construction. In the late 1990s the company formed Hathaway Construction (HC) to provide Hathaway Properties with a competitive advantage in construction and general contracting.

Now Hathaway concentrates on managing the development of its own complexes, while also stepping out to do most third-party general contracting.

“Our specialty is wood-frame garden-style apartments, but as an owner we’ve done high-rise condos, townhomes, and student housing,” says Tom Cook, a project manager who has been in the industry for 20 years and with Hathaway since 2006.

Assembling More than Wood HC has now developed and built upwards of 12,000 units, thanks in great part to the strength of its team.

HC employs about 25 people, which includes office and field personnel. The core group of construction employees includes a senior project manager, three project managers, two assistant project managers, a project administrator as well as an in-house staff for estimating. In the field each job has one superintendent, two assistant superintendents and a site administrator.

“We subcontract everything, we do not self-perform much,” Cook explains. “We send out a bid letter to our pool of subcontractors, who can pull up the plans off a secure Web site. We get three to five subcontractors bidding in each category, so then it’s

the project manager’s job to qualify the bids and award the appropriate subcontractors. Depending on the job it goes to the most qualified bidder, not always the lowest.”

Assembling the right team is a large part of HC’s success, as jobs can pose challenges from constructing on blastrock to highly customized interiors. “We want people that are accommodating and don’t make excuses, even if we need them out there early or late to get something done on time,” Daniel says.

Each job requires several separate contractors for specific tasks. Within each trade HC bids work to several subcontracting companies in the same field throughout the year; this assures HC can always pull from someone with whom the company has a proven track record, and balancing repeat business with competition to achieve the best pricing. “The subcontractors we use now are people we’ve worked with for multiple years,” says Cook. “With the tough economic times we still have a strong sub base that we can pull from.”

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When working with new companies HC pays attention to their quotes and then weighs the cost savings versus the references and financial stability. “If we go for a low number and the sub goes belly up that puts us in a bad position as a GC,” Daniel explains.

Reputation is important to HC. Speed and precision are imperative on jobs such as those HC performed in the GO Zone (Gulf Opportunity Zone), where work was completed on an accelerated schedule. Under challenging post-hurricane circumstances, Hathaway – more directly, Brandon Waters, a Project Manager of Hathaway – was able to take advantage of a tax credit deadline for the client and to benefit the surrounding community.

many years of extensive experience in multi-family apartment construction. We believe that to be successful in this market you need direct experience, and we help build people up through our system. We make sure we stay on budget, stay on schedule, and do it safely.”

To keep these problem-solving employees satisfied at HC; management offers them health insurance, including dental and vision as well as a 401K matching option. Daniel is quite proud of HC’s bonus program, which “is very generous and very performance-based – if jobs are finished quickly, completely and safely, we reward people immediately,” he says.

Building a Better System

“We’re a very open book in the office; everyone here has been around for a while,” says Daniel.

“Our project managers are generally younger than industry normal and we communicate effectively.

Our superintendents are better than average, with

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To meet its goal of continued safety for every project, HC requires employees are OSHA 10-hour certified and urges employees to continue with their education to use on the jobsite. “We hire outside consultants

to do mock OSHA inspections, because the last thing we want is for anyone to get hurt, and we talk with the superintendents all the time,” Daniel adds. “The first thing that would get you fired is an unsafe job, a site that isn’t clean and kept up.”

In addition to its focus on safety, HC is also concentrated on sustainability. “We’re a member of the U.S. Green Building Council, we’re EarthCraft Home-certified, and we have a project manager who is a LEED-AP,” says Daniel.

“I have recently become a LEED Green Associate and the rest of the construction team is working towards the same goal and certification.”

Daniel realized that as the general contractor HC cannot make an owner use certain light bulbs to make a building greener, so instead “we encourage

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them by telling them about how we’ve used ideas such as solar panels on clubhouses and other green initiatives we’ve employed in the past. We really concentrate on minimizing costs, but see what we can do without costing tremendous amounts of money,” he explains.

An example of one of HC’s sustainable projects is a clubhouse completed in south Atlanta that incorporated solar panels as a power source and utilized Energy Star-rated appliances.

Additionally, the company drilled a well for irrigation water as opposed to using city water. “We used highefficiency HVAC, water heaters and sprinklers – it’s little things like that we’ve been doing,” Daniel shares. “Water conservation is a big deal, and we’ve been doing that for awhile.”

two clubhouses and two pools. HC completed the project successfully and included irrigation and water conservation via water-efficient heads on the sprinkler system.

Currently, HC is breaking ground on new projects through the company’s connection with the Department of Community Affairs in Georgia. These projects are low-density projects of 56 individual

For a similar project, HC teamed with a developer from West Point, Ga., to build a mixed-use facility in Valley, Ala., in conjunction with the new KIA plant built nearby.

The owner’s development team worked closely with the Korean owner of that plant to develop apartments that would be friendly to the Asian population emigrating from Korea to the United States to work for KIA. A percentage of the interior finishes installed included hardwood flooring instead of carpeting, “we did little things like that to make it more comfortable and for the tenants to feel more at home,” Tom describes.

This project was also interesting for HC because of its large size.

Normally HC builds complexes with a maximum of 14 buildings and 220 to 300 units. However, this project called for 28 buildings and 610 units, in addition to |7

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homes, spread across 20 acres. Each unit will be EarthCraft Home-certified.

These projects all fit into HC’s philosophy on sustainability and its future goals in that niche.

“It’s a progression,” says Daniel. “I think the next wave of projects will continue to be more and more environmentally friendly and we’re staying ahead of the curve.”

It is this focus to make sure the contract value is the same or better at the end of the project that makes HC so popular to project owners. “We try to make it easy on them; we don’t want to be a contractor that is constantly demanding things of the owners,” Daniel adds.

focusing on more private developments, as well as HUD-financed projects. “We offer a solution before presenting a problem and that’s the biggest thing that differentiates us from other contractors,” summarizes Daniel.•

COMPANY AT A GLANCE Established : 1988 President of Construction : Daniel Hathaway Employees : 25

w w w . h a t h p r o p. c o m

Meeting project owner needs, staying familiar with cutting edge sustainable technology and keeping a stellar safety record through skilled employees, Hathaway Construction has established the momentum to keep it continually expanding its opportunities. In the future the company is

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Hathaway Construction Winter 2009

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