Featured in The Wall Street Journal

In 1993, National Group was featured in Wall Street Journal article:

Cleanup Crews: In Wake of Disasters, Some Firms Prosper Doing the Rebuilding --- Peter Bookholt Sees 10 Years Of Work in Florida Areas Battered by the Hurricane --- Vying for Trade Center Trade

By By Eric Morgenthaler, The Wall Street Journal
Mar 23, 1993 | Copyright Dow Jones & Company Inc

MIAMI -- Thanks to Hurricane Andrew, the World Trade Center bombing and the Blizzard of '93, business is booming for people like Peter Bookholt. 

Mr. Bookholt owns a Texas-based construction company, Larson & Associates, that specializes in mopping up after disasters. As Hurricane Andrew roared through here last August, he was in California, checking on work from the 1992 Los Angeles riots and the 1991 Oakland fire. Within days, he hopped a flight to Miami.

Now, the 48-year-old Mr. Bookholt has a team of about 30 full-time employees here. He expects between $12 million and $15 million of Andrew-related construction work this year. That is a drop in the bucket, set against the $15.5 billion that insurers now estimate Andrew may cost them, but it is significant for Mr. Bookholt's company, whose revenue typically runs in the neighborhood of $35 million a year. He predicts "probably 10 years' worth of work" from the hurricane.

Meanwhile, he already is talking with insurance companies about rebuilding from the blizzard and storms that battered much of the East Coast earlier this month. An insurance consulting firm he often works with, Hudson International Group, is overseeing the cleanup of Dean Witter's 30 floors of offices in the World Trade Center, although so far Mr. Bookholt hasn't picked up any business there. And today , Mr. Bookholt plans to be in Chicago, estimating the damage in a mosque fire.

Mr. Bookholt says demand for disaster work, which he combines with a more conventional construction business, is constant. "There are disasters going on all the time," he adds. "But they're often the little disasters you never see in the papers. A church burns down, an apartment complex catches on fire. It's a daily thing."

That thing has given rise to an industry that specializes in the peculiar needs of rebuilding after disasters. It is an amorphous group that ranges from part-time consultants to sizable corporations, many of whom have close ties to the insurance industry. It includes specialists -- in water-damage repair, for instance, or document restoration -- and generalists.

The size and shape of the industry are blurred because big disasters attract fly-by-night outfits and because many reputable building and repair concerns, while not specializing in disasters, do disaster-related jobs in the normal course of business. But lately the disaster trade has been put under the spotlight by a string of major tragedies.

"The World Trade Center is not routine. Hurricane Andrew is not routine. They are things that present impossible situations," says Frank Lively, president of M.F. Bank Restoration Co., a Norcross, Ga., company that recently signed a contract with the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey to oversee cleaning and restoration of its World Trade Center. "But that's what we do," he continues. "We deal with the impossible most of the time."

Although disasters usually don't reflect the economy, the disaster trade sometimes does. "When the economy goes down, people tend to cash out their losses and do repairs themselves," says Maureen McCormick, secretary-treasurer of FireDEX Inc., an Allentown, Pa., company that does fire-repair work. "The job may not be done as well, but they'll settle for it because they have the insurance check in their hand."

Part of the work is human relations. "You're dealing with people who've gone through a tremendous trauma," says Ben Weyuker, a South Florida contractor hired after Andrew to open an office here for D.R. Horton Inc., a Texas-based builder.

"They were having to deal with an insurance company they never had to deal with before other than making a premium payment," Mr. Weyuker says. "People didn't even know where to start." Horton has set up an office in a trailer in the badly damaged Country Walk neighborhood south of Miami and offers to handle everything from negotiating with a homeowner's insurer to building a new house.

Corporations need help, too. Hudson International, the Wayne, Pa., firm overseeing the Dean Witter cleanup, sees an expanding market in acting as a go-between with companies and their insurers on rebuilding from major property losses.
Many disaster specialists concede that they could be seen as vultures of sorts. "How good our business is really depends on how bad business is for somebody else," Mr. Bookholt of Larson & Associates acknowledges.

But their services clearly are in demand. "Nobody was prepared for the magnitude of damage," Mr. Bookholt says. In terms of property damage, Andrew is the costliest natural disaster on record. According to the Hurricane Insurance Information Center, an industry-sponsored group here, Andrew generated some 625,000 claims in South Florida and Louisiana. So far, insurers have paid out about $13 billion.

The cash is only beginning to spark reconstruction; many areas south of here still resemble bombed-out war zones."Rebuilding really is very, very slow," says Bill Stokes, president of Miami-Dade Community College's Kendall campus, which is in a battered area. "Psychologically, people are just sort of down."

Charles Lennon, executive director of the Builders Association of South Florida, says this far outstrips local builders' capacity. Although many local builders and licensing boards have resisted letting outsiders share in the work, Mr. Lennon advocates just that. "The local industry can't handle it," he says. "The best thing in the world for the local industry is honest competition that comes in from outside."

Which brings us to Peter Bookholt. Over the past couple of decades, he has built a conventional construction business into an all-purpose disaster shop offering everything from damage estimates to reconstruction itself. His niche is insurance-related work -- about 90% of his business.

If a disaster distorts local markets for supplies or equipment, Mr. Bookholt trucks in what is needed from afar. He prefers to hire locally, but if he can't, he taps his operations elsewhere. He did that recently in riot-torn parts of Los Angeles. "You couldn't get local help," he says. "So we brought people from Texas." He adds: "I can man a job any place in the country within 24 hours. We've done it so long we know what we need."

When Mr. Bookholt flew here the week after Andrew, he already had a commitment for work. Hours after the hurricane struck, he got a phone call from Hudson International's chief operating officer, Philip W. Webster, with whom he had worked after the Oakland fire.

"I said we were going to send down a marketing team to start trying to generate some business from the hurricane," Mr. Webster recalls. "I asked Peter if he was prepared to do the same thing in Florida he did in Oakland. He said, `Sure, let's go.'"

Mr. Bookholt flew to Miami with a few estimators and other staffers and began seeking out insurers, claims-adjusting firms and developers. "We made our initial contacts with whomever we could find," he says, "but it was almost impossible to find anybody. Communications were terrible."

He began adding local staff. He hired a state-licensed contractor from Fort Myers, on Florida's west coast, because his own Florida contracting license had lapsed. He hired a state-licensed architect from Miami. For marketing he hired a former real-estate man, Jack Paget -- who, he says, "knows everybody in town."

By the second week, work began coming in from Hudson, which insurance companies had retained to help settle major claims. Hudson hired Larson, Mr. Bookholt's firm, to do "guaranteed" estimates of the cost of work that Hudson's engineers deemed necessary on damaged properties. Larson is paid by the hour for its estimates, but its guarantee means that Larson, which is bonded, will do the work itself at the estimate price if requested. Mr. Bookholt says Larson winds up doing the work only "maybe 20% of the time," but he says its guarantee "helps contain the price and keep scamming down."

On one winter's day, for instance, Mr. Bookholt's crew was investigating damage to a Miami Beach mansion. The owner and his contractor had presented the insurer with a repair estimate of $1.1 million. As Mr. Bookholt went through the house with the contractor, he began finding discrepancies. For one room, the contractor had included a charge for recarpeting a floor -- that was tiled rather than carpeted. In another, the contractor had listed about $9,000 of repairs; Mr. Bookholt put the cost at $375. In the end, Mr. Bookholt estimated the repairs at just under $500,000, and he says the homeowner settled for that.

Mr. Bookholt says virtually all his work here so far has come from insurance inspections -- more than 7,000 units in all, mainly individual apartments, but also houses and commercial structures. But he has begun picking up other jobs, including a church reconstruction and a $1.5 million condominium restoration project. He figures that type of work is just now beginning to kick in.

"We're getting calls every day now, from people driving by and seeing our signs and asking for bids on work," he says. "Evidently they've settled with their insurance companies, and they're getting ready to build. I think six months from now it will get even busier."

Mr. Bookholt got into the disaster business by accident. A New Jersey native, he moved to Florida in 1965 and started a marine-construction business, building such things as sea walls, in Fort Myers. "One thing led to another," he says, and his small subcontracting firm grew into a general contractor operating in several states. In 1982, he moved his base to Bedford, Texas.

Although his business now operates under several corporate names, the holding company is Larson & Associates -- Larson being the maiden name of Mr. Bookholt's wife, Connie. The Bookholts own 75% and a private investor the rest. Although Larson's payroll fluctuates with its workload, it has a permanent work force of about 40.
Along the way, the company slipped into disaster work. "It's one of those things where people call you up with reference to some job, and it just grows," Mr. Bookholt says. He says he isn't even sure what his first disaster-related project was, though he guesses it involved storm-damaged structures back in his Fort Myers days.

His business got a major lift in the 1970s, when it began doing work for consultants hired by insurers. The work often involved investigating surety claims -- in which, for example, an insurer was having to pay up after a builder that it had bonded had failed to complete a project. Mr. Bookholt would prepare a "guaranteed" estimate of the cost of completing the job, and the insurer would use it in settling the claim. Mr. Bookholt would often do the construction work as well. It was a quick jump from that type of work to doing disaster-related estimates for insurers.

All of this makes for good business but hard work. Mr. Bookholt continually shuttles from coast to coast, and these days gets home to Texas only about one week in five. He says he typically spends three weeks here, a week in California, a week in Texas, then back to Florida.

Inevitably, he has the trappings of an itinerant life. His beeper is hooked up to an 800 number. He travels with a mobile phone. And more than six months after Hurricane Andrew, he and his staff are still operating out of some cramped guest rooms in the Miami Airport Inn.

Credit: Staff Reporter of The Wall Street Journal

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