National private equity is buying construction — but not the IE's contractors

Citrus Belt Review: The 2025 total jumped from the 2021-2024 average of 299 deals and $25.9 billion. The warning that travels with that money — laid out this week in a Construction Dive opinion piece by a construction attorney — is conflict of interest: when a PE-backed developer is both the project sponsor and the builder, it has reason to steer work to its own affiliate regardless of price or quality, with the cost differences buried in change orders and allocations. That structure isn't hypothetical in the IE — it's the dominant model.

The region's large industrial product is built largely by vertically integrated developers that own, develop, and construct in-house: Alere Property Group, with a portfolio above 30 million square feet, describes itself in exactly those terms; Dermody self-performs both speculative and build-to-suit work here; Transwestern's development arm builds the projects it sponsors. When the builder and the owner share a parent, the arm's-length general contractor disappears, and with it the outside bid that would otherwise discipline pricing.

What's striking is where the national money is not going. PitchBook's surge concentrated in construction technology ($4.1 billion) and engineering ($20.9 billion) — not in rolling up the local general contractors who frame steel and pour concrete. The IE's contractor base, on the available public record, remains what it has long been: independent, often family-held firms like Riverside Construction, in business since 1967, and Tilden-Coil. No public evidence points to a private-equity rollup of the region's GCs. The affiliate-conflict risk the national piece flags is real here — but it lives upstream, in who develops the warehouse, not in who was hired to build it.