Top California commercial building contractors (2014)

Last month we compiled a list of the Top 25 US Solar Contractors from 2014. This month we decided to take a closer look at the contractors driving commercial growth in California, by studying those with the most building permits from 2014.  

This list is compiled of firms that work primarily on new commercial construction. We omitted firms that mainly focus on tenant improvement or commercial remodeling, as determined from their general permit data type. Sometimes, permits are missing project valuation, we controlled for this by calculating average valuation as a function of total project valuation and the permits that did include project valuation. The average valuation is omitted in the case that the project valuation was missing completely from the permit data. The list is sorted in descending order by total permits, including both permits that did and did not report project valuation.

After considering the top 25, a few things jumped out: 

• The Bay Area’s boom – Five of the top seven spots on the list are held by Bay Area based companies, for a total of 1,500 building permits.
• Southern California growth – Companies based in the Los Angeles and San Diego metro area accounted for 12 of the top 25 spots, for a total of 1,748 permits.
• The Four Out-of-Staters – We were pleasantly surprised to see four of the top 25 commercial contractors are headquartered outside of California. New York based Turner Construction clocks in at number 6 with 227 building permits.
• McCarthy is a large-scale project leader – St. Louis based McCarthy Building Companies Inc leads the list in terms of highest average valuation ($5,709,915), building everything from corporate headquarters to retail outlets.

The top 25 are listed in the table below along with links to their BuildZoom profile matched to their corporate headquarters. Some of these companies have multiple licenses and profiles on BuildZoom. Currently, you can see their other profiles by searching for their business name and location on BuildZoom. In the future, we’ll be introducing a section on these profiles to allow you to easily navigate all of the profiles associated with national companies. 

If you have specific questions, comments or are interested in learning more about our data, contact us directly.