Most contractors respond to a labor shortage by recruiting harder. McCarthy just bought a hotel.
McCarthy Building Companies said on August 12 that it has broken ground on the McCarthy Anchor Campus, a 12-acre learning and training campus at 2100 S. Priest Drive in Tempe, Arizona. It opens in early 2028 and will serve the firm’s 8,000-plus salaried and craft employees across 19 U.S. offices.
A convention hotel becomes a trade school
The site is a former DoubleTree by Hilton hotel and convention property that McCarthy acquired in January 2026. ENR, citing commercial data provider Vizzda, put the purchase at $27.5 million. McCarthy has never confirmed a price, and no renovation cost or total project value has been disclosed, so don’t read $27.5 million as the project value.
SmithGroup is the architect. The renovation keeps the property’s Frank Lloyd Wright-inspired design language and adds flexible classrooms, breakout space, on-site lodging, wellness amenities and outdoor areas. Pyramid Global Hospitality will run the campus through its PyramidWorks division, which means hotel-grade hospitality management applied to a contractor’s training facility rather than a conference room with a projector.
It complements McCarthy’s existing Innovation and Craft Workforce Center in Chandler, Arizona, which opened in 2023 and focuses on craft and trade-partner training. Tempe covers both craft and salaried staff.
The retention argument
“The construction industry has always been a people business, but the knowledge and leadership needed to deliver today’s projects are evolving faster than ever as owners demand greater certainty,” said Ray Sedey, McCarthy’s chairman and CEO. “This campus represents a significant investment in our people.”
Read the ownership structure alongside that. McCarthy is 100 percent employee-owned, and ENR placed it at No. 20 on the 2025 Top 400 with more than $6.9 billion in revenue. An ESOP contractor capitalizing a 12-acre campus with on-site lodging is making a claim about where its enterprise value sits, and the answer is in the people who already work there.
What it signals about capacity
The binding constraint on contractor growth right now isn’t backlog and mostly isn’t equipment. It’s whether there are enough superintendents, project engineers and foremen to staff the work already sold. Hiring your way out of that has gotten expensive and unreliable, because the person you recruit from a competitor is usually someone another firm is simultaneously trying to recruit from you.
Building a permanent facility with residential capacity is a different bet: that bringing craft and salaried staff together for structured, repeated, multi-day training raises internal promotion rates enough to matter. The 2028 opening date says McCarthy expects the problem to still be there in two years.
The demand side supports that. Multi-package programs like the Memphis International Airport terminal modernization, running seven concurrent construction packages under one CMAR, only work if the contractor can field seven qualified teams at once. That’s a staffing problem before it’s a scheduling one.
Worth noting that August 12 is the announcement date rather than a confirmed shovel date, and several trade repostings dated August 16 are verbatim PR rather than independent confirmation.