What it is
Canyon Corporate is a Phoenix office campus, worth roughly $10 million, that its owner is converting to apartments one building at a time. Building 1 is a five-story Class A office building: a 118-sheet first city submittal, 177 units on the cover across five floors and 179,740 square feet. Its plan set was in city plan check, a second building was already in design, and the owner wanted one price for the interior partitions within about a month.
The walls are Xtrata's SABS panel system, a foam-core panel with a cementitious coating that stands in for studs and board, installed by Xtrata's own trained crew. LÏEF Development's side was the installation and coating labor, fire-rated drywall, finishes, hard-lid ceilings and firestopping. No shell, structure or site was in scope: only partitions.
What Common Ground did
- Because a conversion is partition walls only, Fowler priced the job on the linear foot of wall by wall type rather than the square foot of floor, and treated the building's total as one application of a rate the campus would keep.
- Building 1 was taken off floor by floor from the architect's enlarged unit details on February 26: 32,405 linear feet of wall across seven wall types, three of them fire rated. The takeoff said on its face that final quantities would come from a digital measurement of the approved set. The first price, v0, came to $2,191,773.
- Revision 2 on April 11 took board and furring off the unrated walls, whose thicker three-quarter-inch coating face takes a finish directly. The estimate dropped $150,177, 6.9 percent, and the plan-check condition went onto the face of the estimate.
- On April 13 the owner set the unit count at 151, not 177, and the finish at Level 3, not Level 4, a specification typo on LÏEF's side that went on the face as its own. The price held: the floor plates and the measured wall had not changed, so only the per-unit figure moved.
- The estimate went to the owner August 20 and was verbally approved September 15, and the owner carried the package into plan check on that basis. The same week the Building 1 metrics were locked in Kanopi, the estimating engine, as the campus standard, each with its source document beside it.
- Building 2's 74-sheet progress set, a four-level parking garage becoming 94 units and 105,746 square feet of new construction, 62 of the units inside the existing structure and 32 new two-story apartments on the deck, was priced the day it arrived, September 15. Its walls were measured from the drawing's own line work, and an independent blind second pass agreed within 2 percent on every wall class and caught about 574 linear feet of angled garage dividers.
- A line-by-line consistency check set the second estimate against the first and produced a short list of items to settle before it goes out. None of them was a rate. The check also found that Building 1's takeoff and approved estimate carry the same total wall but split it differently: 1,177 more linear feet in the fire-rated classes, 3.6 percent of the wall, a split rather than a quantity, running toward the owner, and closed by the digital measurement the estimate already requires.
Results
- A $2,041,596 partition package on Building 1, verbally approved and in plan check, anchored to the measured wall; it held through a change in the unit count.
- Building 2's plan set arrived September 15 and its first estimate went out that afternoon.
- The campus now runs on a rate standard with a re-measure rule: no standard touches a new building until that building has been measured on its own.
- The consistency check travels with every second bid on a campus, so the owner sees what is open before signing rather than after.
External links
- Public data room: Canyon Corporate data room
Stories from this work
Reading the competitor's bid before writing your ownLIEF's Strata partners had three bids to turn around the same week, including a big office campus job where word came back that an out-of-state general contractor with no local crews had already put in a competing bid.Insider truth
Correcting your own number out loudThe Canyon Corporate Center bid went through multiple client-driven revisions.The honest call
Let the partner with the track record answer for himselfAn investor group was evaluating a HUD-financed deal on Canyon Corporate and asked our Strata partner directly to lay out his own general contracting experience with HUD deals before the group met.Standing on principle
At a glance
| Project type | Takeoff, pricing structure and bid revision |
|---|---|
| Industry | Commercial office conversion |
| Seat | Takeoff and pricing lead, partition package, Building 1 |
| Ran through | LÏEF Development |
| Dates | January to September 2026 |
| Duration | Nine months |
| Location | Phoenix, Arizona |
| Public data room | Canyon Corporate data room |
| Related pages | Lïef Development + Construction, Xtrata |
| Credit | Created by Common Ground |