By Rebecca Baird-Remba
As commercial construction begins to eclipse New York City’s overheated residential development market, big contracting companies are beginning to shift their focus.
Although upscale rental and residential condominium construction will always be a mainstay of the Gotham real estate world, the square footage of commercial and infrastructure projects under construction have far outpaced the amount of residential development. From January to August of this year, work began on 8.7 million square feet of commercial buildings, 3.2 million square feet of institutional projects and 8.8 million square feet of residential buildings.
The office development numbers are up 118 percent year-over-year, compared with just 4 million square feet of commercial projects that began construction during the same eight-month period in 2017. Residential construction starts were also up 21 percent compared with 7.3 million square feet during the first eight months of 2017.
The biggest developments that kicked off this year include Tishman Speyer’s $1.8 billion, 2.9-million-square-foot Spiral office building by Hudson Yards, Chris Xu’s 67-story City View condo tower, and Durst Organization’s Queens Plaza Park rental building, the latter two being in Long Island City, Queens. Cove Property Group’s 17-story expansion of the Hudson Commons office building in Midtown West into a 26-story, 700,000-square-foot commercial tower rounds out the list.
So even as construction surges across all the major sectors, construction pros expect the high-end residential market to continue cooling off. AECOM Tishman head Jay Badame predicted that apartment building would remain “relatively flat” while office and infrastructure construction would take off.
Similarly, Bill Gilbane III, the senior vice president of Gilbane Building Company, felt that his family’s firm would take on a growing amount of office and public works contracts. “There’s a lot of infrastructure work [that’s needed], and I see the city as very active in preparing for the future and investing in that infrastructure right now.”
In recognition of the shifting market, we asked Dodge Data & Analytics to rank the top construction firms based on the value of projects that have begun construction over the past 12 months. The numbers only include the new construction, not renovations or projects that began more than a year ago. Keeping that in mind, here are the top 10 construction companies.
