Five members of Perlo Construction‘s executive leadership have joined the company’s ownership team.

Jeff Fisher, president; Chris Gregg, senior vice president of operations; Chris McLaughlin, vice president of preconstruction services; Devin Koopman, vice president of construction services; and Todd Duwe, vice president of business development, join long-time owners Jeff Perala and Gayland Looney.

“We’re excited to add the executive leadership to our ownership team,” Perala said in a news release. “This is part of our ongoing strategic plan that ensures continued growth and innovation, building on our long-term relationships with clients and our community.”

The ownership expansion presents the opportunity for long-term sustainability for a company that’s been in business since the 1950s.

Perlo, based in Tualatin, is a regional commercial construction company with projects based in Oregon, Washington and California. The company employs more than 300 workers, including engineers, superintendents, project managers, craftspeople, estimators, and administrative support staff.

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Industrial real estate continued to hum along in 2021, with fewer vacancies, active leasing and growing rents, Kidder Mathews reported.

In the Portland area, industrial space continued to enjoy strong demand as retailers responded to consumer demand for shipping. Developers, meanwhile, pushed ahead with real estate plays north and south of Portland.

“Industrial has been sort of that one product type that’s been most resilient and has seen the most growth,” said Chris Nelson, principal of Capstone Partners, a Portland-based developer.

Asking lease rates grew 4.4 percent from $0.69 per square foot on a triple-net basis to $0.72 per square foot in 2021 compared to a year earlier, Kidder Mathews reported in a fourth-quarter update. Among other findings:

• Vacancies fell from 4.0 percent to 3.2 percent.
• Leasing activity jumped 15.6 percent from 9.9 million square feet in 2020 to 11.4 million square feet in 2021. The most active submarkets were Southeast Portland and the I-5 corridor with 35.8 million square feet and 29.4 million square feet leased, respectively.
• 6 million net square feet were absorbed – most of which occurred in the fourth quarter.
• Sales volume fell 24.2 percent from 10.4 million square feet in 2020 to 7.9 million square feet in 2021.
• Projects totaling 4.9 million square feet were under construction in the fourth quarter, while 1.8 million square feet were completed in 2021. The Bridgepoint I-5 development delivered 677,568 square feet to the Airport Way submarket, and Portside Industrial Park added 192,960 square feet to the Central Business District/West Vancouver submarket.

The industrial market has seen more mega-deals as users led by Amazon locked up space near cities. Specht Properties sold a parcel near Woodburn for $23.3 million in June. Amazon plans to build a five-story, 3.84-million-square-foot shipping warehouse on the Specht parcel and two neighboring parcels, for which it paid a total of $27 million, The Oregonian reported.

“What’s really pretty spectacular from a market perspective is how strong demand has been, particularly from large users,” Nelson said.

While Amazon gets the headlines, other retailers such as Walmart and Target have moved aggressively into e-commerce, buttressing demand for logistics facilities.

“What you’re seeing is that traditional retail businesses that would have distributed out of a warehouse to bricks and mortar – they’re all pursuing an omni-channel strategy,” Nelson said.

Capstone Partners is looking for a build-to-suit user for a potential 750,000-square-foot facility in Salem. “We’re hoping that will be a start (in 2022), but we’ll have to see,” Nelson said. “It depends on demand.”

Specht is building a 468,793-square-foot industrial building in Ridgefield, Washington, on speculation. (CEO Greg Specht could not be reached for comment). Completion is expected in August. Mackenzie is the architect and Perlo Construction is serving as general contractor.

“You’ve seen bigger sites and bigger development projects both north of Portland and down in Salem,” Nelson said. “(2022) in my opinion will be very much like ’21: another growth year.”

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CONSTRUCTION

Perlo Construction has hired Jakob Eisenbeiss as a project engineer. Eisenbeiss came to Perlo as an intern during the past summer. He has bachelor’s degrees in both biology and finance from Oregon State University. He has demonstrated his project management and problem-solving abilities and is skilled at collaborating with a team to get the job done.

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CONSTRUCTION

Jean Rwandika has joined Perlo Construction as a project engineer. Rwandika recently graduated from Portland State University with a bachelor’s degree in civil engineering; he first came to Perlo as an intern. A proven problem-solver, Rwandika looks forward to having a position that directly impacts the growth of infrastructure in the community.

Please send your announcements for 91��Ƶ People to djcpeople@djcOregon.com.

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CONSTRUCTION

Perlo Construction has hired Rachelle Belew as a project engineer in its special projects group. With a bachelor’s degree in business administration from Portland State University and a wide range of experience in project coordination, Belew comes to Perlo with a demonstrated knowledge of the construction industry and the ability to manage projects with maximum efficiency.

Please send your announcements for 91��Ƶ People to djcpeople@djcOregon.com.

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This free article brought to you by Perlo Construction

While questions saturate the construction market’s future, industry leaders still see strong resiliency.

Commercial builders typically have a three-to-five-year horizon for planning and implementation. Tim Johnson, general manager and executive vice president of Skanska USA Building, said time will tell whether there will be long-term economic ripples from the pandemic that affect contracting businesses in the Portland-metro area.

“We believe the market is strong, and if our pipeline and planned pursuits are an indicator, there will be few recession-type concerns,” he said about Skanska’s 2021 projections.

Skanska is looking to rededicate itself to carbon reduction through use of mass timber, Johnson said. The company is focusing on wood because it requires less preparation, less handling, less packaging and less refinement, he said.

Skanska has set a goal to reduce its carbon emissions globally by 50 percent by 2030. The company is using technology to calculate emissions and refine its resource strategies.

“By being proactive in our planning and building choices today, we will help work towards achieving this lofty goal,” Johnson said.

Aside from managing projects and dealing with the pandemic, Skanska is striving to increase diversity in its workforce, and form relationships with diverse vendors and project partners, Johnson said.

Greg Holloran, operations manager for Turner Construction, said there’s still a lot of uncertainty, especially with the market. But he believes that could soon change.

The rollout of COVID-19 vaccines is the “first piece of certainty that we have seen that has the potential to change something in the next coming months dramatically,” he said.

The economy has been through a formidable storm, but Holloran said Turner still believes work will be available.

When the pandemic initially hit, Perlo Construction Vice President of Business Development Todd Duwe said the firm was trying to get its arms around business.

The company has since focused on its workers’ welfare to ensure there aren’t any outbreaks on job sites.

Contractors made sure they were following social distancing rules, Duwe said, because if one project team didn’t follow the rules, the whole industry could have been shut down.

“It was a kindred spirit – didn’t matter if we were competitors,” he said. “As an industry, we’re all in this together. As an industry, we were concerned about keeping our job sites safe.”

Perlo Construction volunteers made face masks for employees and handwashing stations for job sites.

“We got our team intact through (2020) and are marching forward full steam ahead while staying vigilant,” Duwe said. “We still see good potential for projects in front of us.”

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The Living Building Challenge is generally considered one of the top green building certification programs in terms of both prestige and rigor. In short, that’s why Mahlum Architects chose to follow that path for its new office in inner Southeast Portland.

Now, Mahlum selected for its new home an existing warehouse that had been converted into office space. There was no chance for the project team to obtain full Living Building certification from the International Living Future Institute.

However, one of the challenge’s seven “petals” – materials – appeared to be within reach. That is where Mahlum chose to focus.

“Petal certification has been around since the beginning of the standard, but it’s allowed (the ILFI) to scale the program,” said Jay Hindmarsh, a Seattle-based Mahlum associate principal and head of the Living Building Challenge portion of the renovation, which covered a 7,500-square-foot office space. “The materials petal is insanely difficult, but for Mahlum it was a way for us to embrace our values around walking the talk. We’ve been advocating for our clients about better materials and lower-carbon materials, and we looked at each other and said our new space should be beautiful but also should be super healthy and have a low-carbon footprint.”

Mahlum’s new space is located in the Custom Blocks‘ south building, at 1380 S.E. Ninth Ave. The single-level building was at one time a metal stamping shop, but was gutted, renovated and seismically retrofitted.

“We were trying to find a place in Portland that would allow us to be near clients and the community,” Hindmarsh said. “The interesting thing about the space is that it had just fairly recently gotten a core and shell upgrade, but in a lot of ways there was a great historic shell there, and it was interesting to see a space where we could envision quantifying all materials we were bringing in.”

The space could not be retrofitted to achieve net-zero energy or water use. But that wasn’t a problem for either Mahlum.

“The most sustainable buildings are the ones that are already built,” Hindmarsh said, paraphrasing Carl Elefante, a past American Institute of Architects president. “Aside from cost issues, clearly we were going to be renovating a space. This concept of net-zero material impacts is where a renovation typology suits itself to the materials petal. We’re not touching the enclosure, so there was a chance for us to not focus on new construction type components and try to promote investment in local economy.”

Slightly more than 50 percent of the products came from within 500 kilometers of the site, with some of the biggest gains coming from sourcing wood salvaged from the existing building. Also, by working with Salvage Works, a Portland supplier of reclaimed wood products, the project team used lumber originally used to build Fort Vancouver to create wall cladding, display cases and more. Such accents complement the existing heavy timber in the former warehouse, as well as a host of Forest Stewardship Council-certified wood products sourced by another Portland firm, Sustainable Northwest Wood. The latter were mainly plywood and lumber used to frame the new space.

“There’s a threshold for salvage products and we vastly exceeded that,” Hindmarsh said. “This embraces the philosophy of not having superfluous materials. Materials should be true to themselves, especially with the Living Building Challenge. If you’re adding in and designing in things that need to be vetted you’re making things hard for yourself.”

Working under Living Building Challenge version 3.1, Mahlum staff vetted over 350 products and materials for red list compliance. One that fit the bill was EcoSmart drywall manufactured by USG, which is known for its popular Sheetrock brand.

“We had never used this one, as it has just come on the market,” Hindmarsh said. “But it lists a 20 percent reduction in carbon emissions for the drywall, and it’s also made in Rainier (Oregon), so it was win-win for all.”

Portland’s Quartertwenty crafted custom workstations to serve Mahlum’s 50-plus employees in the new office.

“We had to catalog all the pieces of wood and steel, the nuts and bolts, the coating on the steel, the weight,” Hindmarsh said. “And getting that done was a huge lift. We were able to get something that met all our design and ergonomic needs and ended up being LBC compliant.”

Finally, waste diversion is required for certification; debris can’t simply be carted to the landfill. In the end, however, the project team managed to recycle close to 95 percent of waste materials generated on site.

General contractor Perlo Construction finished the project last year. Mahlum moved in this past November, and petal certification was achieved on March 17.

It was a very valuable learning experience for the Mahlum team, Hindmarsh said.

“I think my recommendation would be do your homework and understand what it will take,” he said. “It is a great opportunity for architecture firms and design firms to really put their process in a petri dish and look at it and their materials library and reflect on their practices.”

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As the COVID-19 pandemic reached the Portland-metro area, a massive shortfall of personal protective equipment (PPE) for health care professionals quickly became evident.

With hospitals, clinics and first responders geared up for day-to-day operations, stocks of crucial equipment such as N95 respirators and filters, latex gloves, gowns and face shields were already low. Then a sudden and massive increase in PPE usage in health care settings led administrators to scramble for answers.

A number of building industry organizations became aware of the situation and stepped up to help. Because certain types of PPE, particularly N95 respirators, are widely used in construction, many firms were in a position to act quickly.

“I have neighbors who are in the medical profession, or that have family members who are, and there is a real and serious shortage of personal protective equipment throughout the region,” said Ryan Baker, a Mackenzie senior associate and a member of its structural engineering team. “We’re all thinking about the safety of our first responders and medical professionals who are doing everything they can to keep us healthy while, at the same time, considering the safety and health of their own families.”

After reading an email from a Portland Neighborhood Emergency Team, Baker suggested to Mackenzie’s disaster recovery task force and business continuity team that the firm donate its unused N95 masks from employee work kits. Mackenzie employees Cesar Villanueva and Mike Rueter then coordinated a company-wide roundup and delivered the masks to the designated Multnomah County drop-off site.

That’s just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to homegrown solutions. Agencies are seeking specific equipment, which should be unused and in good condition. This includes latex-free gloves (sealed boxes only); procedural masks; surgical masks; N95 respirators and N95 filters; other respirators such as P100s and PAPRs, and associated supplies and parts; face shields; splash shields; gowns; hand sanitizer and disinfecting wipes.

“We first started talking about it around March 17 or 18 as news stories started coming out,” said Kirsten Adams, public affairs counsel for the Associated General Contractors’ Oregon-Columbia chapter. “As soon as we started hearing about the need, we tried to do something about it. Someone with OHSU reached out to me, and they were looking for PPE, so we were thinking about how to get this information out to our members and how do we act as a conduit for this.”

AGC quickly created a COVID-19 web page for members and issued a plea for donations at its March 20 board meeting. The group first connected with the Oregon Health Authority and its Salem drop site before coordinating with Oregon Health & Science University on another drop site in the South Waterfront District.

“We want to make it as easy as possible to get this into the hands of the people who need it most,” Adams said. “We’ve given our members as many options as we can.”

Trade groups, including unions, also responded to the call for PPE.

“We’re reaching out to everybody we know in our industry, and we’ve been able to collect a bunch of extras (N95 masks) from contractors who’ve had them,” said Robert Camarillo, executive secretary of the Oregon State Building and Construction Trades Council. “We were among the first group to be contacted.”

Camarillo added that unions around the country are mounting similar efforts.

“I talked to a business manager and he was dropping (equipment) off at a fire station earlier in the day,” he said. “And he said it was impressive to see how many people were donating.”

The AFL-CIO, added, has been doing the same around the country.

“That’s the labor movement jumping into action,” he said. “Everybody is making the necessary adjustments to adapt and help where they can, and we want to be there too.”

Other individual firms around the metro area are stepping up.

“We found and donated a few boxes that we had available to the hospitals,” said Todd Duwe, director of business development for Perlo Construction. “We are actually making our own masks currently. We gave away our N95s for the health care workers. We donated what we had to our health care clients we work with, so we are making our own now.”

The latter is a story in its own right.

“We have our own in-house counsel; she happens to be a seamstress,” Duwe said. “So she is making an initial batch of 500 (face masks) right now. In between looking at these Washington contract review items, she is sewing masks; I am not kidding. Everybody in the company is shifting a little to deal with this.”

Villanueva said early preparation, including Mackenzie’s creation of a disaster recovery task force, allowed action to be taken immediately.

“The team put in a lot of effort years ago to provide each employee with a small waist pack that had some basic first aid items and supplies to assist them in an emergency situation,” he said. “Gathering the N95 masks from those (packs) and dropping them off was the least that we could do. We were so happy to be able to help, and just thankful to our frontline medical teams.”

Awareness is critical, Adams said.

“We’re trying to keep it at the forefront of people’s minds,” she said. “Gathering hand sanitizers is a real need, and we’re trying to do as many little things like that as we can.”

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When Washington Gov. Jay Inslee this week issued guidance calling for most construction projects in the state to shut down, reactions from the building industry came swiftly.

The original “Stay Home, Stay Healthy” order from Inslee’s office included construction among industries considered essential and able to continue during the COVID-19 pandemic. But then a clarification issued Wednesday made clear that construction must shut down through April 8. The governor could also choose to extend the order at his discretion.

But the ambiguously worded “clarification” has raised additional questions. What seemed allowable Monday suddenly wasn’t on Wednesday.

“The frustration for us has been that lack of clarity,” Nelson Holmberg, executive director of the Southwest Washington Contractors Association, said Thursday. “We spent the whole week from Monday through last night seeking clarity, and the latest memo still leaves things up in the air a little bit. We’re getting a lot of calls from members concerned about what to do, and we’re advising our members to live to the letter of the law right now.”

Construction, with a few exceptions, is not considered “essential” under the state’s “Stay Home, Stay Healthy” order. Those exceptions are:

• “construction related to essential activities as described in the order;
• to further a public purpose related to a public entity or governmental function or facility, including but not limited to publicly financed low-income housing; or
• to prevent spoliation and avoid damage or unsafe conditions, and address emergency repairs at both nonessential businesses and residential structures.”

A memo issued by the Associated General Contractors of Washington indicated that while the Washington State Department of Transportation is shutting down virtually all of its projects, school districts and other public entities are authorized to make their own decisions whether to proceed with public infrastructure work. Publicly funded low-income housing projects will be allowed to continue, but market-rate residential projects will not.

“We are disappointed in the governor’s decision, but we also realize that the health of citizens and our workforce is paramount,” AGC of Washington Executive Director David D’Hondt stated in the group’s memo. “In the meantime, we will continue to work with the governor’s office to help get construction going as soon as possible.”

Todd Horenstein, assistant superintendent for facility support services with Vancouver Public Schools, confirmed public school work now under way is proceeding under practices recommended by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

“Our projects are continuing,” Horenstein stated via email. “We have an exemption under the governor’s memo sent out yesterday. School projects are considered necessary for public purpose; all of our contractors are working and practicing safe working condition as guided by the CDC.”

Private-sector jobsites and projects, however, now have to be secured during the shutdown.

“The BIA is deeply disappointed with the governor’s clarification issued last night,” Building Industry Association of Clark County Executive Director Avaly Scarpelli said Thursday. “He significantly narrowed the original order, which allowed for housing construction. (The) clarification of the order is a devastating blow to the building industry and local economy.”

The short-term effect, she added, will be a backlog in builders’ ability to provide housing units.

“Many (builders) are now facing the hard decision to lay off eager-to-work employees at this time,” Scarpelli said.

Perlo Construction builds large industrial and commercial projects – including logistics facilities – in both Oregon and Washington. Todd Duwe, the company’s director of business development, said the firm is approaching its work on a case-by-case basis.

“We’re just trying to get more clarification of that essential business component,” Duwe said. “Our preference is to keep jobs open and keep moving forward. For instance, logistics companies and distribution can be considered essential – they are delivering food, medicines and other things – and I think the governor’s office is still reviewing that, and there is still communication with industry on that.”

Jennifer Spall, communications director for the Building Industry Association of Washington, echoed this.

“We’ve been inundated with calls from members asking ‘Where is the line?’” she said. “We’re taking those on one by one right now.”

The state opened a website for affected parties to ask just that question, while the BIAW and other groups are coordinating with state agencies to ensure unemployment insurance and other benefits will be available to construction workers out of work as a result of the crisis. The pending federal emergency stimulus package is another potential source of relief, Spall added.

“We’re not only spending a lot of time answering questions; we’re just hearing heartbreaking stories about people having to lay off employees,” she said. “They don’t know how they’re going to struggle to make it through this. We’re still coming through all that and trying to understand what it all means.”

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A new Jaguar Land Rover dealership is on track to open this fall in Tigard, and it will have an amenity possibly unlike any other.

General contractor Perlo Construction is building the facility for Don Rasmussen Co. on land wedged between the Washington Square shopping center and Oregon Route 217. Tigard-based Mildren Design Group designed the project, TM Rippey is the civil and structural engineer, and WHPacific is in charge of landscape architecture.

The massive facility’s first floor alone will have 65,988 square feet. That space will be dedicated to an array of amenities, including a sales floor, a large service area, an automated car wash and a covered area for potential customers to step into cars for test drives.

A slope on the site allows the service area to be virtually subterranean, and be topped by two levels of garage parking for customers.

In addition to accounting for that slope, the project team faced a number of challenges. Mildren Design Group senior architect Curt Trolan said one was the city’s requirement that 50 percent of the frontage be along the street. That led to inclusion of a 1,800-square-foot pavilion along Southwest Greenburg Road. The glass-sided pavilion will hold two vehicles on display inside, adding a much-improved pedestrian experience outside the L-shaped building.

“This is the first facility we know of in the world where we’ve got a pavilion like this,” Trolan said. “We’re going to end up with just a stunning facility that we’re going to be quite proud of.”

The rest of the frontage faces Route 217. A strategic decision was made to cloak the dealership’s service area from the highway, so only the most pristine elements are visible from all angles of passing traffic.

“We’re trying to capitalize on all these exposures from different perspectives,” dealership manager Dan Muggli said.

Aside from the massive panes of glass for transparency, the building will be adorned with metal panels of champagne silver and sunshine grey – the company’s custom paint colors.

Besides the pavilion, there will be room for two more display vehicles, plus 14 on the showroom floor. On site there will be parking for 100 additional new vehicles.

The 39,000-square-foot service area will have 31 service bays and five more dedicated to vehicle alignment and detailing services. A mezzanine will afford the foreman a full panoramic view of the facilities.

The Tigard dealership fits within Jaguar Land Rover’s global initiative. Its “Arch” concept, which began in 2016, requires that all dealerships carry both brands. Company guidelines ensure each dealership looks and operates the same.

A single welcome kiosk will direct customers to either the Jaguar space or Land Rover space, which will be separate. There will be no individual desks for salespeople, because they will be able to process all transactions on tablets.

In the service department, a large tool bay will contain a wide variety of technology to aid mechanics. There will also be a queue area where necessary tools can be set out before each day’s work begins.

The service area will feature three lanes able to accommodate vehicles either entering or exiting. Two of the three lanes will allow for either incoming or outgoing traffic, depending on time of day.

Muggli said demand for the Jaguar Land Rover brand has far outgrown the existing dealership in Northeast Portland. Besides that one, the nearest dealerships are in Seattle; Boise, Idaho; and Sacramento, California. The new facility will be the premier one in the region, he said.

Don Rasmussen Co. is looking to break the typical car dealership mold, Muggli said, and noted there would be no parking lot full of stickered cars or inflatable gorillas.

“We’re building it to serve not just the Portland/Vancouver (Washington) area, but all of Oregon for that matter,” he said.

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