Always satisfy the client

Real Estate Weekly, Nov 10, 1993 by Derek Alger

Guzzardi noted that York Hunter currently has 118 employees, double the number of employees the company had in 1987.

York Hunter is also one of the most active builders in Chinatown, having recently completed the headquarters of the Bank of East Asia and the Hotel Maria, a conversion of an old manufacturing building into Chinatown's first hotel. The Hotel Maria, with 256 rooms, is located at Lafayette and Howard Streets and was completed in 1991.

According to Colao, the Bank of East Asia, for whom York Hunter completed a new 10-story United States headquarters in 1992, is the second largest bank in Hong Kong.

"The new headquarters houses the third largest security vault in Manhattan and represents future work with Chinese and other Asians," Colao said.

In a recent survey of the nation's top construction firms, Engineering News, the industry's leading periodical, ranked York Hunter 7th among construction managers and 54th among all construction managers nationwide.

"To be a successful organization, to be living, is to grow, and to promote growth with people," Colao said. "We have an extremely small turnover of people."

Colao and Guzzardi, who left Lehrer McGovern to form York Hunter, both confessed that they always dreamed of running their own construction company.

"We shared a similar outlook and were always looking to improve things," Guzzardi said. "I always thought about starting a firm and I seriously began entertaining the thought in the late '70s."

Guzzardi finally realized that Colao was the ideal partner and York Hunter became a reality in 1983.

"It just came to a point where I recognized our thinking was similar about what a firm should do and how a client should be treated," Guzzardi said.

In terms of the future, Colao does not expect to see a dramatic rise in new construction, but he feels that York Hunter will continue to grow.

"The boom in the '80s in the private sector was an aberration and has forced a lot of firms to rethink their way of working," Colao said. "Overall, I see no great increase in construction but I see ourselves continuing to grow due to our single source responsibility."