Some companies chase growth. BEC Austin, instead, has built its reputation one finished project and one satisfied owner at a time.
Founded in Austin in 1971 by Bailey Elliott, the company incorporated in the early 1990s as Bailey Elliott Construction Incorporated. Scott Wilson and Keith Poole, both longtime project managers and estimators under Elliott, purchased the company from him in 2003 and carried it forward. Years later, the company rebranded as BEC, a change that let it build a distinct identity in Austin’s competitive construction market while continuing to uphold the standards Elliott had established decades earlier.
Keith Poole retired from company management three years ago, and Scott Wilson now owns and leads the business. Today, BEC has 23 employees and a reputation built across Austin’s commercial and multifamily sectors, with a particular niche in low-income housing tax credit (LIHTC) construction. As the region has grown, so has demand for the kind of complex, highly technical projects the company has built its name on, and BEC has continued to position itself around exactly that kind of work.
Built on trust
According to Devin Wood, Vice President of Business Development at BEC, that reputation comes down to one thing above all else. “It’s trust,” he says. “Our reputation is the most important thing we have, and that reputation is built on relationships of trust.”
Wood points to the company’s willingness to operate transparently with the owners it works for. Many of BEC’s projects are open-book arrangements, where the company shares its bids and its accounting directly with clients.
“We’re sharing our accounting books with the owners, showing them exactly what we’re costing,” he explains. “We try to be very transparent with owners.” That transparency extends to cost and scheduling updates throughout a project, so owners always know where a job stands. Combined with a track record of finishing jobs on time and under budget—not to mention strong working relationships with architects and consultants—it gives clients the confidence to return to BEC for their next project.
BEC works across a broad range of commercial and multifamily construction, and Wood describes that range as a genuine strength as it lets the company take on projects across many sectors rather than depending on a single market.
That breadth also gives BEC’s teams a wider base of experience to draw on when a project doesn’t fit a conventional mold, which, as Wood tells it, describes a growing share of the company’s work. But within that diversification, BEC has developed deep expertise in a handful of areas, and LIHTC housing sits at the center of that specialization.
LIHTC housing comes with its own layer of governmental regulation, and Wood says success in that market depends on more than technical construction skill. It requires understanding of the communities the housing serves. “Our teams, from estimating to project management to superintendents in the field, understand the communities that we’re serving,” Wood says.
Welcoming a challenge
That expertise is on full display in BEC’s newest and most ambitious undertaking, the Bloom, a seven-story multifamily development that recently broke ground after more than a year and a half of preconstruction work. The project is technically demanding on nearly every level. Its structure combines a three-story concrete podium with four stories of wood-frame construction above, meaning the building has to satisfy Type I construction standards on its lower floors and Type III standards on its upper floors (two different building classifications integrated into a single structure).
The financing behind the Bloom is equally complex, layering multiple funding sources with their accompanying legal and regulatory requirements. The top four floors will provide standard multifamily LIHTC housing. The bottom three floors, though, are something different altogether: specialty housing that will be owned and operated by a foundation serving adults with mental disabilities, replacing outdated facilities the organization currently relies on.
“That’s a really special thing to be able to do,” Wood says. “It’s not just multifamily; this is full-time care. It’s not quite a nursing home, but it’s somewhere in between.”
Adding to the challenge, the Bloom sits on a zero-lot-line site, with construction running from property line to property line with no room to spare. BEC is working on a 26-month schedule, having started construction in June, putting the project roughly two years out from completion.
Collaboration is key
Projects of this complexity, Wood says, are exactly where BEC’s approach sets it apart. He points to a common problem with the traditional design-bid-build process where architects can design a project that fully addresses a site’s complications and an owner’s needs but do so without construction cost input along the way. When the project goes out to bid, the owner can discover it is 20 to 25 percent or more over budget, with no way to value-engineer that much cost out of the design. The result is an expensive, time-consuming redesign bringing new architectural and engineering fees, months of delay, and sometimes even a return trip through the permitting process.
BEC prefers to get involved from the earliest stages of a project, sometimes starting with little more than a single sketch of a proposed building. Drawing on its construction history and strong subcontractor relationships, the company can put together a detailed and accurate cost estimate at that early stage, then continue refining pricing alongside the architect and owner as the design develops.
“We don’t want to do the architect’s job, but we’re there to help them,” Wood says. “We’re there to make suggestions that could keep a project on budget, suggestions that are maybe different design-wise than what they had originally intended but allow the project to keep the design intent and stay on budget.”
Leading the sustainability charge
BEC has spent nearly two decades at the leading edge of sustainable construction, and Wood sees that focus as a long-term investment rather than a passing trend. His reasoning is straightforward: the high-performance, energy-efficient buildings of today tend to become the standard building code of tomorrow, so staying ahead of the curve now pays off for owners and for BEC alike.
Wood has personally worked on LEED-certified projects since 2007, when the certification was still a rarity in the industry. He notes how far standards have shifted since then: work that once qualified as advanced green building under LEED has now largely become standard building code. That shift matters to the owners who plan to hold their buildings for the long term, since they tend to care most about lifetime energy costs and long-term value, both of which green building programs are designed to protect.
That long track record gives BEC’s clients two distinct advantages, Wood says. As a LEED Accredited Professional, he can walk owners through the real costs of pursuing a given certification level based on the company’s own project history and connect them with past clients who can speak to the long-term energy savings those investments produced.
On the construction side, BEC’s project teams, many of them LEED AP or LEED Green Associate certified, are well versed in the additional documentation LEED projects require, from tracking recycled material content to managing waste and recycling submittals.
Among BEC’s sustainable projects, one that stands out to Wood personally is the Lakeline Learning Center, a net-zero-energy building certified under the Living Building Challenge, a standard considerably more rigorous than LEED. Wood believes it remains the only Living Building Challenge project in Central Texas, and he served as project manager on the build.
“It was a major challenge to do that project,” he says. “It took a lot of effort to do it. To this day, it’s still one of my favorite projects to have been involved in, just because of the immense challenge that it was to bring that project to fruition.”
Embracing the future
Now, technology is reshaping how BEC and the rest of the construction industry operate, and Wood expects that shift to accelerate. The company is already exploring artificial intelligence tools for tasks like data parsing and comparing subcontractor quotes, processes that have traditionally required significant manual work.
Wood doesn’t expect AI to touch the work happening on job sites as the technology already in use for grading and site work isn’t likely to change dramatically. What he does expect to change is the administrative side of the business, compliance tracking, and submittals over the next two to five years.
“It’s going to make us more effective and make us more accurate,” he says of automation’s growing role in project management. “We’re going to see fewer mistakes through the process, and it definitely makes all teams more accurate and more efficient.”
Investing in people remains just as important to BEC’s future as investing in new technology, and the company is preparing to launch a more structured internship and apprenticeship program next summer, after running a brief internship effort in the past. With an aging workforce across the industry, Wood sees bringing in new talent from area colleges as essential to the company’s long-term strength, and BEC has already begun recruiting on local campuses.
Of course, safety runs through every part of the BEC culture as well. Rather than relying on a specific safety platform, the team works with a safety consultant who regularly inspects the company’s job sites and focuses on building a positive safety culture from the top down, rather than simply enforcing rules from the outside. “We want every single person that shows up to work on our job site to go home safely to their families,” Wood says. “That’s the goal every single day, and we take it very, very seriously.”
For Wood, everything BEC does traces back to the same idea that construction is fundamentally a relationship business. The company’s plans for growth center on strengthening the ties it already has with clients, subcontractors, and design partners, while building new relationships on the same foundation of trust and reliability.
That extends to how BEC thinks about leadership within the company. Wood believes the construction industry is evolving too quickly for anyone, individually or organizationally, to stand still. “We try to foster a culture at BEC of constantly learning,” he shares. “The day you stop learning is the day that you’re left behind. If you want to be a leader in the industry, whether that’s an individual leader on a job site or in a leadership role in a company, you have to be willing to stay at the forefront and constantly be learning.”
More than five decades after Bailey Elliott founded the company, BEC continues to carry forward the standards he set in careful, transparent work built on relationships that last well beyond a single project.
With the Bloom underway, a growing internship program on the horizon, and a widening embrace of new technology, BEC is positioning itself for its next chapter the same way it built its first: through steady, trusted work, one project at a time.
