Vanir Construction Management

Vanir has been managing construction for owners since 1964 and is headquartered in Sacramento, California, with 23 offices across Arizona, California, Colorado, Illinois, Texas and Washington and more than 350 employees. It is a minority- and woman-owned firm working on the owner’s side of the table: program management, project management, construction management, real estate services and technical services, without holding trade risk. Vanir provides project and construction management to the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation on the San Quentin Rehabilitation Center, the 81,000-square-foot education and vocational campus delivered by McCarthy Building Companies under progressive design-build and opened in February 2026. Other current work includes the Del Norte County Regional Airport, the Chabot-Las Positas Community College District Biological Sciences Annex, and water treatment plants for the City of Lemoore.

Dorene C. Dominguez chairs Vanir as chairwoman and CEO, with Jerry Avalos as president and Daniel Ferst as chief operating officer and Bay Area manager. Area leadership is split across Northern California, the Bay Area, Central California, Sun West, the Pacific Northwest, the Central States and the Midwest, which is a fair map of where the firm’s 350-plus employees actually work.

What separates an owner’s representative from a consultant who only writes reports is in-house technical depth. Vanir keeps a Technical Services Group staffed with licensed architects and engineers, project controls managers, estimators, building information modeling specialists, certified inspectors and commissioning agents. That group backs up project teams with cost estimating, scheduling, constructability review and virtual design and construction, and its architecture, design and planning arm handles site planning, programming and space planning, feasibility studies, condition and needs assessments, and design criteria documents through schematic design.

On the program side the work starts well before a shovel moves: budget development, delivery method analysis, contractor and designer procurement, contract negotiation, change order prevention and analysis, and community engagement. The constructability reviews look at buildability and biddability, work sequencing, long lead time procurement, site restrictions and phasing constraints, which is to say the issues that turn into change orders when nobody catches them at the document stage.

Public agencies also lean on Vanir for money, not just management. The firm researches federal, state and private grant programs and prepares applications, with named experience in FEMA’s Public Assistance and Hazard Mitigation Grant Programs, HUD’s Community Development Block Grant Program, USDA rural loan applications and the federal Clean Water Grant Program, followed by payment request preparation, compliance and audit support, and closeout assistance.

The real estate arm is a separate line of business: licensed brokers and agents handling acquisitions, leasing, site selection and due diligence, lease review and work letter negotiation, plus repositioning and property management across commercial, office, retail, hospitality, industrial park and financial space.

Featured assignments give a sense of the range. They include the Los Angeles County Metropolitan Transportation Authority headquarters building, Contra Costa County’s Administration Building B and public plaza, work for the San Diego County Regional Airport Authority at San Diego International Airport, the Field Arts and Events Hall on the Port Angeles waterfront in Washington, the Barrow Neurological Institute tower at CommonSpirit Health’s St. Joseph’s Hospital in Arizona, Gillespie County Jail in Texas, Manzanola School District 3J in Colorado, and West Park High School Phase I.