Approach
Open book, cost plus a fee, and subcontractors worth what they charge.
Building in Southwest Florida is expensive and getting more so. Labor is short, insurance and material costs keep climbing, and post-hurricane demand has left a market where a number can vary wildly from one bidder to the next for the same scope of work.
Gino Torriero spends his time on the part of that problem an owner cannot solve alone: finding the subcontractors who deliver the best value. Not the cheapest number, which usually returns as a change order, but the trades whose pricing, workmanship and schedule actually hold up. That list took decades to build and it is the single largest lever on what a project costs.
How we price
Cost plus a fee, open book
Every project runs cost plus a fee, on the open book method. You see what each subcontractor bid, what the materials cost, and what we add on top. Nothing is buried in an allowance or marked up quietly between the invoice and your statement.
The reason is simple: when the books are open, a saving found in the field is your saving, so we have every reason to go looking for it. Owners see where the money is going while there is still time to make a different decision.
- /Every bid visible
- /Invoices passed through at cost
- /One agreed fee, stated up front
- /Savings stay with the owner
01
Design-led construction in Southwest Florida
The architect and the project manager are the same team, so drawings and budget move together instead of meeting for the first time at bid. We start from your goals and your number.
The architect is Mali Torriero, AIA, who runs our sister practice, Luca Architects. Twenty-five years in practice, licensed in Florida, Pennsylvania and South Carolina, a certified Passive House Designer, and two Pittsburgh Home of the Year houses. She is on the site through construction rather than handing over a set of drawings and leaving.
That closes the usual gap. A detail gets priced as it is drawn, and a question in the field is answered by the person who drew it, the same week.
luca-architects.com →
02
Construction management for commercial projects
Already have an architect? We run the design and construction phases from there, on the same open book terms.
Nello Construction was founded in 1952 and completed over a billion dollars of work in the Pittsburgh area: county courthouses, high schools, university buildings, a stadium, museums, restaurants and distilleries, on jobs from five thousand dollars to a hundred million. Gino Torriero ran that company as CEO.
Institutional work on a public schedule teaches you to see a budget, schedule or labor problem while it is still small. That is the part we brought to Florida.
03
Owner’s representation in Naples
On residential projects we sit on your side of the table: contractor selection, contract negotiation, budget control and construction monitoring, enforcing quality and code compliance as your advocate.
This works because we have spent thirty years on the other side of it. Gino knows what a subcontractor’s bid leaves out, which line items get padded, where a schedule is optimistic, and what a change order should actually cost. Reading someone else’s contract is easier when you have written a thousand of them.
Useful if you are building in Naples from out of state and cannot be on site every week.
