Paul Hewins
Title: Co-chief operating officer, Skanska USA Building
Age: 49
Experience: 28 years
Commercial construction is booming in Greater Boston and Skanska USA Building is getting its share of the action. In March 2012, Skanska’s development group partnered with Twining Properties to develop the 300-unit Watermark Seaport residential tower in Boston’s Seaport District. Skanska is also developing and constructing 101 Seaport, a 440,000-square-foot office tower whose anchor tenant will be PwC, and serving as construction manager for Novartis’ 550,000-square-foot expansion of its Cambridge campus.
Q: How do you decide which geographic markets and real estate sectors to invest in?
A: We have markets we’re established in, Boston being one of them, and we look to grow in our home markets. In Boston, we’re pretty fortunate. We’ve got a strong civil presence which includes engineering. We have a commercial development group and Boston happens to be a hot development market. We’re looking at things that make sense for us: commercial offices, residential properties. In our building group, our core markets tend to be large institutional work like Harvard, aviation work, life science like Novartis, and schools.
The vision for Skanska is: construction and development is local, but when you look at markets like life science, aviation, large stadiums, we look at them across the country and see where those opportunities are and we leverage the local units.
Q: Where would you rank Boston as a development and construction market nationwide?
A: Here it feels like we came out of the recession quicker than most and there’s a lot of activity, more than most places around the country. Here (cost) escalation isn’t so much about labor pricing and commodity pricing, it’s more about local market escalation. So when people were really desperate for work a few years ago, some of the contractors are starting to get a good book of work. Labor is getting a little bit thinner. As the market gets bigger, you have to rely and more and more people. What you’re feeling is some subcontractors get a little more choosy about the jobs they work on, the labor market gets stretched.
Q: What unique building practices are being used at the Novartis project in Cambridge?
A: It’s two buildings over a common underground area. We’re doing prefabrication at an off-site shop where it’s extensively using building information modeling. A lot of it’s mechanical, utility racks and risers, but there’s also multiple prefabricated components. We’re trying to do anything that gains us speed, efficiency and saves money. It’s a laundry list. You have to pull the building apart and see what makes sense. They’re unique structures, so they’re not repeatable components.
Q: How are building techniques changing in lab space?
A: It’s more about flexibility of space, and then in the construction perspective, doing as much offsite prefab or modular because you can do it before the area’s ready. It reduces the manpower and waste onsite.
Q: Is that carrying over to office construction as well?
A: You have to think about why would you modularize something and why would you prefab it. Primarily you do it because it saves you time and money, but secondarily you do it because it increases the quality of the product. You get it done sooner so there’s time to verify, check and inspect. What you may think about is if the market is escalating and you could buy components sooner because you think costs are going to increase down the road, and you do an early procurement plan because you’re avoiding cost escalation.
Q: What’s the last book you read?
A: "Boys in the Boat” by Daniel James Brown. It was about an eight-man crew team out of Washington that won the gold medal in 1936.
Top Five New England Sports Moments:
- Patriots winning their first Super Bowl over St. Louis in 2002
- Red Sox coming back from a 0-3 deficit against the Yankees in 2004
- Bruins Stanley Cup run in 2011
- Celtics championship series against the Lakers in 1984
- Eve Hewins’ two-goal Homecoming performance in 2013
