The Mountain West is growing faster than it can be built.

A $2.2 trillion industry run by small, owner-operated firms.

U.S. construction spending ran at a seasonally adjusted annual rate of about $2.2 trillion in August 2026. It is one of the largest sectors of the economy, and one of the least consolidated.

Fragmentation is the opportunity. Fewer than one in ten construction establishments employ twenty or more people, which means most of the industry’s capability sits inside private companies with a single owner, no institutional capital, and no obvious buyer when that owner is ready to step away.

Why construction, and why now.

Construction is essential, local and physical. It cannot be offshored, it cannot be downloaded, and the country is behind on it.

The backlog is measured in trillions

The American Society of Civil Engineers estimates it would take $9.1 trillion between 2024 and 2033 to bring U.S. infrastructure to a state of good repair. At current funding levels, roughly $5.4 trillion will be spent, leaving a $3.7 trillion gap. Roads, energy and schools carry the largest needs.

The owners are ready to sell

Industry surveys have long shown that more than half of construction firm owners are over 55, and fewer than half have a formal succession plan. Those surveys are dated, but the cohort they describe has only aged since. Family transfers fail often, and most of these companies are too small to attract a strategic acquirer or a traditional buyout fund. That leaves a large pool of profitable, well-regarded companies with no natural exit.

Scarcity gives the incumbents pricing power

When skilled labor is short, the firms that already employ trained crews win the work and set the terms. A contractor with a stable field workforce is not a commodity, even if its services look like one on paper.

You can raise a building fund in a quarter. You cannot train a master electrician in one.

Why the Mountain West.

National population growth slowed to 0.5% in 2025. The Intermountain states kept growing at two to three times that rate, and construction employment followed.

Housing is behind demand

Utah’s Kem C. Gardner Policy Institute puts the state’s housing deficit at roughly 44,000 units, about eighteen months of homebuilding. A separate estimate projects Utah will build only about 72% of the 842,000 homes it needs by 2055. In Arizona, an ASU real estate professor estimates the state is currently adding less than half the units needed to keep pace with population growth.

The region is a data center and power corridor

JLL ranks Phoenix second in North America for planned data center development, with Las Vegas and Reno close behind. Salt Lake City and Denver have the lowest industrial power costs of any major data center market JLL tracks. Every one of those campuses needs electrical, mechanical, concrete, site and utility contractors, and the transmission, substation and water work behind them.

A barbell, not a bet on one state

Colorado is our anchor and home market, covered in detail in the next section. Around it, we expand selectively into Idaho, Utah, Arizona and Nevada, where population and construction growth are running hottest. The result is a barbell: recovery value along Colorado’s supply-constrained Front Range, paired with secular growth in its neighbors.

Colorado is our anchor.

Colorado is where we live, where our relationships are, and where the next decade of highway, power and housing work is already funded or required by law. Its headline growth has slowed. The work has not.

Construction is still hiring

Colorado added 5,900 construction jobs in the twelve months to September 2026, a 3.2% gain and the ninth-largest numeric increase of any state. That came in a year when the Leeds School of Business forecast statewide job growth of only 0.6%. Leeds still expects Colorado’s GDP to grow 2.9% in 2026, ahead of the national pace.

The public pipeline is funded and named

In May 2026 the Colorado Transportation Commission adopted a new 10-Year Plan: more than 250 highway and transit projects at a combined cost of about $11.8 billion. The Front Range regions carry most of it.

Power is the next build cycle

Xcel Energy, which serves most of the Front Range, has said it will need roughly $22 billion of new Colorado infrastructure to keep up with demand, much of it driven by data centers. It has projected Colorado data center load reaching 8.5 GW by 2040, against about 5.8 GW of statewide generating capacity today. Every new line, substation and interconnection in that plan is electrical, civil and site work.

Growth moved north and east

Colorado’s population is not shrinking; it is relocating. Weld County grew 1.9% in 2025, the fastest of any large county in the state, passed Larimer County in population for the first time, and is up about 15% since 2020. Elbert County grew 4.1%, the fastest of any county. Johnstown, Erie and Windsor posted some of the biggest gains of any town in the state, while Denver and Arapahoe counties lost residents. Builders follow land and price, and so do we.

Housing is still short

The State Demography Office estimates Colorado was about 106,000 homes short in 2023, down from a 2019 peak of 140,000, and needs about 34,100 new homes a year to keep pace. The Denver Regional Council of Governments puts the metro area’s need at 223,000 units between 2023 and 2032. State law now requires local governments to complete housing needs assessments by the end of 2026, putting unit targets on the public record across the Front Range.

The slowdown is our entry point

We are clear-eyed about the soft spots. Net domestic migration turned negative in 2025 for the first time since 2004, and the 2026 job forecast is modest. For a buyer, that is useful. Owners selling in a slower year meet fewer competing bidders, while the state’s highway, power and housing work is already funded or legally required. We would rather buy Colorado contractors at the bottom of the migration cycle than at the top.

Colorado’s growth didn’t stop. It moved up I-25 and out onto the plains, and the infrastructure is following it.

Why private equity stayed out, and why that is our opening.

For decades, institutional investors called construction too lumpy, too cyclical and too project-driven. Those objections are real. They are also mostly problems of fund structure, not of the businesses.

Size alone moves the multiple. A business at about 4x below $1 million of EBITDA can command about 7x once it crosses $5 million, with the same crews and the same customers. Specialty contractors with infrastructure and data center exposure trade at 7.5x to 10x, while residential generalists trade at 2.5x to 4x. Buying well, building scale and shifting mix toward specialty and recurring work is where returns are made.

Skilled labor and infrastructure are the plays of the next twenty years.

Most of the demand for new construction workers in 2026 comes from retirements, not growth. The workforce is aging out faster than it is being replaced, and the work in front of it is getting bigger.

Why labor is the moat

Associated Builders and Contractors estimates every additional $1 billion of construction spending creates about 3,450 jobs. Demand for electricians in particular has risen with data center construction, and immigration enforcement has reduced the inflow of new workers in ways that are still hard to measure. A contractor that can recruit, train and keep a field workforce owns the scarcest input in the industry.

Infrastructure money is large, and it is in motion

The five-year Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act expired on September 30, 2026. Congress extended its programs through December 11, 2026 while a long-term reauthorization is negotiated. Public construction is running at about $548 billion a year, and highway construction alone at about $151 billion. The timing and mix of the next bill are uncertain; the need behind it, a $3.7 trillion gap, is not.

Capital is not the constraint in construction. People are. We want to own the people.

The service layer: HVAC, fire and life safety, and critical communications.

Infrastructure isn’t only what gets built. It is what has to keep working. Every hospital, data center, school and office tower carries mechanical, fire and emergency-communication systems that codes and regulators require someone to inspect, test and repair, year after year.

This is the part of the thesis that answers private equity’s oldest objection to construction. Service revenue rides on the installed base, not on new starts. It recurs on a code-mandated calendar, it continues through a downturn, and buyers pay for it. In HVAC, buyers now expect to see maintenance-contract revenue and discount a business heavily when it is missing.

Colorado turns HVAC into a compliance trade

Building Performance Colorado covers about 8,000 buildings of 50,000 square feet or more and requires the sector to cut greenhouse gas emissions 7% by 2026 and 20% by 2030. Energize Denver goes further, covering buildings of 25,000 square feet and up. Some owners have argued they cannot meet the targets without overhauling their HVAC systems. Either way, thousands of large Front Range buildings need benchmarking, audits and mechanical upgrades between now and 2030.

Why it fits how we invest

Service lines are a natural extension of the contractors we buy: the same customers, the same licensed technicians, and a reason to be on site every year. They turn one-time project relationships into contracts, raise the share of recurring revenue, and move a company up the valuation ladder. M&A advisors put regional fire and life safety companies with a management team and a recurring base at roughly 5x to 8x EBITDA, while scaled national platforms are valued far higher. Specialty-contractor deal activity rose 44% quarter over quarter in early 2026, driven largely by fire protection and life safety roll-ups.

Construction builds the asset once. Service gets paid every year it stands.

How we invest.

We acquire established, profitable contractors in the Mountain West from owners who are ready to transition, and we hold them to compound.

• Who we buy. Specialty and self-performing contractors with long operating histories, real field crews, and a reputation the owner wants protected.
• Where. The Front Range, the Wasatch Front, the Treasure Valley, the Phoenix metro and northern Nevada.
• What we change. Estimating, job costing, scheduling and cash visibility, using modern and AI-assisted tools so margin leaks are caught weekly rather than at closeout.
• What we don’t change. The name on the truck, the crews, and the relationships that won the work.
• How we grow. Layer HVAC service, fire and life safety inspection, and emergency-responder radio testing on top of project work, cross-sell across companies, and invest in apprenticeships so we grow our own workforce.

What we watch.

A thesis is only credible if it names what could break it.