Work record / Estimating / Canyon Corporate

Canyon Corporate: I priced the rate and measured the building

On a Phoenix office campus turning into apartments, I priced the walls as a rate and measured each building on its own. That is why the number held when the unit count moved.

The seat

I was the takeoff and pricing lead for the partition package on Building 1, from January to September 2026. The work ran through LÏEF Development and used Xtrata's SABS system for the walls.

Sector	Commercial office conversion
Type of work	Takeoff, pricing structure and bid revision
Where	Phoenix, Arizona
Years	January to September 2026
How long	Nine months
Through	LÏEF Development
Credits	Common Ground Jesse Fowler, Takeoff and pricing lead

What I was brought in to decide

Canyon Corporate is an office campus in Phoenix, valued at roughly $10 million. Its owner is converting it to apartments, one building after another. Building 1 is a Class A office building, five stories, 179,740 square feet. Its first city submittal ran 118 sheets and showed 177 units on the cover across five floors. The plans were in city plan check and a second building was already being designed. The owner wanted a single price for the interior partitions in about a month.

The walls use Xtrata's SABS panel system. It is a foam-core panel with a cementitious coating that does the job of studs and board, and Xtrata's own trained crew installs it. LÏEF Development's part was installation and coating labor along with fire-rated drywall, finishes, hard-lid ceilings and firestopping. The scope was partitions only. No shell, structure or site work was included.

What we did

A conversion is partition walls and nothing else, so I priced by the linear foot of wall, sorted by wall type, instead of the square foot of floor. I treated the building's total as one use of a rate the whole campus would keep using.
On February 26 I took Building 1 off floor by floor from the architect's enlarged unit details. It came to 32,405 linear feet of wall in seven wall types, three of them fire rated. The takeoff said right on its face that final quantities would come from digitally measuring the approved set. My first price, v0, was $2,191,773.
Revision 2, on April 11, removed board and furring from the unrated walls. Their thicker three-quarter-inch coating takes a finish directly. The estimate fell by $150,177, or 6.9 percent, and the plan-check condition went on the face of the estimate.
On April 13 the owner fixed the unit count at 151 instead of 177, and the finish at Level 3 instead of Level 4. The Level 4 was a typo in our own specification, and we noted it on the face as ours. The price held, because the floor plates and measured wall were unchanged. The only thing that changed was the per-unit number.
On August 20 the estimate went to the owner, and the owner approved it verbally on September 15 and took the package into plan check on that footing. That same week we locked the Building 1 metrics into Kanopi, the estimating engine, as the campus standard, with the source document next to each one.
Building 2's 74-sheet progress set arrived September 15, and I priced it that day. It turns a four-level parking garage into 94 units, and the new construction totals 105,746 square feet. Of the units, 62 sit inside the existing structure and 32 are new two-story apartments on the deck. The walls were measured from the drawing's own line work. A blind second pass, done independently, landed within 2 percent on every wall class and found about 574 linear feet of angled garage dividers.
I then ran a line-by-line consistency check of the second estimate against the first. It produced a short list of items to resolve before the estimate goes out, and none was a rate. It also showed that Building 1's takeoff and approved estimate hold the same total wall but divide it differently. The fire-rated classes carry 1,177 more linear feet, 3.6 percent of the wall. That is a difference in split, not in quantity, and it leans toward the owner. The digital measurement the estimate already calls for will settle it.

Results

A $2,041,596 partition package on Building 1. The owner approved it verbally and it is in plan check. It is tied to the measured wall, and it survived a change to the unit count.
Building 2's plans arrived on September 15, and its first estimate went out that same afternoon.
The campus now works from a standard rate with a re-measure rule: no standard is applied to a new building until that building has been measured separately.
Every second bid on a campus now gets the consistency check, which shows the owner what remains open ahead of signing instead of afterward.

The lesson

Price the rate, and treat the building as something you measure rather than count. Then the number survives when the count changes.

Stories from this work

Correcting your own number out loudOn the Canyon Corporate Center bid I kept the estimate on square footage and named my own labeling error openly.Let the partner with the track record answer for himselfWhen investors asked about HUD experience, I put the partner who owned that record in front of them.Reading the competitor's bid before writing your ownBefore pricing a big office campus bid, I had the team reverse-engineer a rival's structure to set a realistic labor range.

Questions about Canyon Corporate, answered

Firm record

Common Ground keeps its own account of this engagement: Canyon Corporate on the Common Ground wiki.

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