LeChase Construction Services

LeChase Construction Services is a construction management and general contracting firm headquartered in Rochester, New York, founded in 1944. It operates across New York State, Pennsylvania, North Carolina and the Southeast, with practice groups in healthcare, higher education, commercial, industrial and life sciences. The firm works primarily under construction manager at risk and design-build delivery for institutional owners. LeChase is construction manager on the $64 million renovation and expansion of Lilly Library at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina, a project that preserves the 1927 Georgian exterior while gutting the interior and adding a west wing that grows the building 78 percent to 56,300 square feet.

Geography is the practical thing to know about LeChase. The firm runs eleven offices along the East Coast, and its subcontractor prequalification form lets bidders check the ones nearest them: Rochester (205 Indigo Creek Drive, the head office), Buffalo, Binghamton, Corning, Syracuse, Schenectady and Armonk in New York, then Gibbsboro in New Jersey, Columbia in Maryland, and Durham and Charlotte in North Carolina. The two Carolina offices post the same North Carolina contractor license, No. 46327. Business development runs through a single number, 888-9-LECHASE, and the company also maintains a separate ethics hotline.

Headcount tracks that footprint. The company reports more than 750 employees today, grown from what began in 1944 as a small family operation set up by Raymond F. LeChase to meet local wartime construction demand.

The service list goes wider than construction management and general contracting. LeChase groups its offerings into construction delivery methods, preconstruction consulting, BIM and virtual design and construction, self-perform work, sustainable building, Lean, and development. Self-performance is treated as a core capability rather than an overflow valve, with the firm describing everything from large-scale concrete pours through the fit-out of complex health care facilities.

On the sustainability side the credentials are specific. LeChase is an active member of the U.S. Green Building Council and works routinely through the LEED certification process, participates in the EPA’s ENERGY STAR Partner Program, holds certified Green Business status through the Green Business Partnership in New York, and works with NYSERDA on energy programs. A number of staff hold LEED AP accreditation. The firm’s position is that sustainable outcomes are set during design, not retrofitted during construction.

Portfolio sectors are broken out as healthcare, K-12 and higher education, commercial, science and technology, industrial and manufacturing, and multi-unit housing. Safety carries its own section of the site, organised around a Zero Incidents goal and a set of Life Saving Commitments.

For subcontractors, LeChase runs a Contractor Project Center and a formal prequalification process, so trades looking to bid should start there rather than with a general enquiry. Owners and design teams are directed to the nearest regional office instead of a central intake desk.