Article from Alaska Journal of Commerce:
You may not think of Builders Choice Inc. as an oil services
company, but it is, and the Anchorage-based modular housing construction
company has a big stake in the future prosperity of the state’s petroleum
industry.
It’s for that reason the company has a large red-and-white
“Vote No on 1” sign at the entrance to its plant on 104th Street in South
Anchorage, said Mark Larson, who owns Builders Choice, or BCI, with his wife,
Sandi.
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Builders Choice owner Mark Larson is seen at the company |
Two-thirds of BCI’s revenues come from projects directly
related to the oil and gas industry, Larson said. The company hopes to
diversify this year with a new business in lumber and building-related
hardware, but for now, $40 million of BCI’s annual earnings of about $60
million are linked to the industry, Larson said.
The company has about 200 full-time employees
“Passage of Senate Bill 21, the oil tax reform bill, has
created an enthusiasm in the industry to keep working here, and when new
projects are developed the industry’s workers need housing,” he said.
BCI operates a 50,000-square foot modular housing
construction facility in south
that builds housing units mainly for industrial and commercial customers, along
with a truss plant in the Matanuska-Susitna Borough that serves homebuilders.
The Larsons have steadily built their business since taking
over the company in 2001. Revenues have multiplied six-fold since then and much
of that was due to the Larsons refocusing the company away from building
modular units for residential construction and toward commercial and industrial
clients such as the oil and gas industry.
Today, the company’s roster of customers reads like a “who’s
who” list in the natural resource industries, but new hotels and other large
buildings, particularly in remote areas, have been important for BCI.
The new Barrow hotel built for Arctic Slope Regional Corp.,
which opened last spring, is one recent commercial project. The building, which
replaced an older ASRC-owned hotel that was damaged by fire, was built in a
joint-venture with SKW Eskimos, Inc.
A new commercial store for
built when a large fire destroyed existing housing in that Bering Sea
community, and BCI also built units for a new school at Kalskag, a village in the
Yukon-Kuskokwim region near
Most recently, the company built the modular operations and
housing facility for the Point Thomson project east of Prudhoe Bay, and
previously built operations facilities for the Eni Oil and Gas Nikaitchuq field
as well as facilities for BP and two large Deadhorse facilities built to house
service company workers, the 426-bed Aurora Hotel and 190-bed Brooks Camp.
BCI also built the camps and operations centers for the
Greens Creek and Kensington mines near
which are both producing.
Other previous commercial customers have included Alyeska
Resort near Girdwood, for an employee housing facility, and modular units that
were used to construct the Denali Canyon Lodge, built for Westmark Hotels.
BCI builds its housing units in a controlled environment in
its
plant which ensures better quality control compared with the traditional
approach of “stick-built” structures where workers and materials are more
exposed to weather and temperature variations, Larson said.
The units are “stackable,” meaning that two- and three-story
complexes are quite feasible. The modules are trucked to the
Slope
electrical, plumbing and even furnishings.
The structures can be built, moved to the
Slope
“With the Brooks Camp phase one (at Deadhorse), we began
fabricating in
in August and had the units moved to the Slope and occupied in December,”
Larson said.
The schedule was possible because site work at Deadhorse was
being done while the modules were being built in
hooked up quickly when they were moved to the Slope.
Larson feels confident he can compete with Lower 48 and
Canadian module fabricators because the costs of moving completed units, which
are bulky, outweigh the lower costs of building outside
He knows this because BCI also operates a small modular
construction plant in
serving the booming shale oil industry in
percent lower in
advantage is more important.
There have been times when the company’s
plants were at maximum use and some units had to be built in
raise costs, Larson said.
