AdaptiveReuse

The honest answer is that the price has a known part and an unknown part, and we tell developers which is which. On the Cabana — a 1960s hotel-to-residential conversion in the Design District — partial abatement and demo had already been done before we started, and a state report flagged lead paint, asbestos in roof flashing, and mold. We price the work we can see, then we contingency the work we cannot, and we staff the project, in Carlos Trevino’s words, "with enough on-site supervision and experienced administrative side to be able to react, communicate, and create plans."

The ones nobody draws. On Cabana, roof flashing tested positive for asbestos and the adhesion was so strong that stripping it brought the masonry parapet walls down with it. On the pool deck, drilling to dowel new connections kept hitting rebar cages that were essentially solid steel — column rebar lapped into beams, beams lapped into each other, and there was nowhere to poke through. That single condition became the project’s largest schedule risk. None of it appeared on a drawing.

In new construction, you set the grid. In adaptive reuse, you inherit it. A column that’s half an inch off-level with quarter-inch clearance leaves you almost no options — you frame studs and set drywall to the worst tolerance point, and the offset cascades through the entire dimensional string, down the corridor, past the bathroom wall. Every apartment ends up built around columns nobody can move. That’s why adaptive reuse takes a PM who has done it before, not one learning on your building.

That is a scope decision and a sequencing decision. On Cabana’s back-of-house conversion, we kept the top ledge of brick so the facade still read as original — and to do that, every individual brick in the way was removed, palletized, cleaned, and reinstalled. Every brick that didn’t have to come down stayed. That work lives at the intersection of preservation craft and structural engineering. It is not a finish trade.

A Tax Increment Fund reinvests a tax surplus to bring abandoned buildings back online — empty buildings depress district value, and a completed, occupied one starts producing tax revenue again. The math is simple in dense downtown districts. Texas SB 840 and SB 2477 layered ~45% tax credits onto adaptive reuse work, which is part of why a $94.6B national category is growing at ~15% a year. Our job is to build to the schedule the credit window assumes — Cabana’s TCO targets Q1 close because the owner needs the tax credits to land in the right window.

The fifty-project GC stops being surprised. Carlos started on his dad’s crew at 19 and worked Mosaic — an adaptive reuse — in 2007 as an A&M intern at ANDRES. The team carries 15 to 25 years of pattern recognition: what an oversized rebar cage looks like when you drill into one, why a column offset compounds the way it does, when to repair a pool deck and when to demo and replace with a new post-tensioned slab. Adaptive reuse is a craft you cannot fast-track.

The same Senior PM you met in the pitch. ANDRES is employee-owned, which changes who is in the room and who stays in the room. The trade partner relationships matter too — Southside Environmental held both the demo contract with us and the owner’s environmental remediation contract on Cabana because their owner has worked with Greg Manao for 20+ years, back to Mosaic in 2007. When the asbestos pulled the parapet down, the team that fixed it had been working together since before the building’s first conversion.