Bartlett Cocke General Contractors

Bartlett Cocke General Contractors has built in Texas since 1959, when Bartlett Cocke, Jr. founded the firm in San Antonio. It is now 100% employee-owned through an ESOP and runs offices in San Antonio, Austin and Houston with more than 600 people. The company works mainly in construction management at risk and design-build, concentrating on schools and higher education, healthcare, civic and commercial buildings, and industrial facilities across the state. In August 2026 Spurs Sports & Entertainment named Bartlett Cocke joint construction manager with Mortenson on the new downtown San Antonio arena, a role the firm holds as a co-lead rather than a subcontractor. Chairman and CEO James Anderson called the award especially meaningful for a builder headquartered a few miles from the site.

The company’s own timeline is the clearest account of how a San Antonio general contractor became a statewide builder. HemisFair Park went up in 1969. The San Antonio Country Club expansion followed in 1973. One Riverwalk Place in 1981 was the firm’s first 18-storey office building; 200 Patterson in 1985 was its first residential high-rise. Driscoll Middle School for North East ISD in 1992 was the first K-12 job — the market that now anchors the business — and a University of the Incarnate Word dormitory and parking garage in 1993 was the first higher education project.

Delivery methods arrived alongside the geography. The Austin office opened in 1996 in the same year as the first construction-manager-at-risk contract, with Pearsall ISD. The first design-build followed in 2000 at Prairie View A&M’s Memorial Student Center. Houston opened in 2001, the first industrial project — Texas Port Recycling — came in 2006, BIM entered the workflow in 2008 on Northside ISD’s Brennan High School, and iPads reached the field in 2012 at University Health System.

CMAR remains the core method. The team joins early to shape scope and sharpen budget, then sets a guaranteed maximum price and a roadmap before construction, which is why school districts running bond programmes and hospitals expanding around live operations tend to use it.

Seven markets carry the work: PK-12, higher education, healthcare, civic and government, commercial, mixed-use, and industrial and manufacturing.

Ownership matters to how the place runs. Bartlett Cocke is 100% employee-owned, and its own framing is blunt about the effect — when you own the work, you build it like it matters. The firm has been recognised as a Best Place to Work.

For trade partners there is a portal carrying bid opportunities, forms and safety information, starting with prequalification. There is also a monthly newsletter and a Building Better podcast for anyone tracking Texas construction.