KC construction veterans: Building products firm will address density gap

Leaders from two Kansas City contractors have joined forces to launch a firm geared toward manufacturing specialized building products its partners say could help shape skylines in and beyond the metro.

ElevenTen Systems opened last week as a collaborative venture among Eric Anderson, founder of PanelPoint, a provider of cold-formed steel and curtain wall panels, and Richard Wetzel and Steve Swanson, co-founders of Centric, a commercial and residential general contractor.

The new firm will serve developers and contractors nationwide by engineering, manufacturing and delivering customized structural and enclosure panel systems for midrise apartment and hotel projects. Anderson will be president, closing PanelPoint and transitioning over with several employees. Wetzel and Swanson will remain in their respective roles as CEO and president of Centric, serving as investors and partners.

ElevenTen and its name originate from the first of several Kansas City projects where PanelPoint and Centric partnered to deploy those systems.

In 2017, Wetzel said the two firms faced a height restriction in building a 70-room expansion of the historic Ambassador Hotel northeast of 12th Street and Grand Boulevard, for developers Coury Hospitality and Sunflower Development Group. Using cold-formed panels allowed the contractors to build shorter floors, fitting 11 stories in a 10-story building envelope for the expansion, which opened in 2019.

Since then, PanelPoint and Centric have completed work on eight area projects together, including Mac Properties' four-corner Crosswalks apartment development at Armour Boulevard and Troost Avenue and, most recently, Sunflower and Americo Life's OxBow Apartments in North Kansas City.

The OxBow and Ambassador Hotel projects saw faster construction, a higher-quality asset and better returns by using the cold-formed panel system, Mark Moberly, partner and director of real estate development at Sunflower, said in a release. Sunflower will start three more cold-formed panel projects with ElevenTen this year.

ElevenTen's first project is underway: Thrash Group's 118-room Origin Kansas City hotel at the Berkley Riverfront. Wetzel said the firm has seen further interest around Kansas City, plus Long Island, South Carolina, Indianapolis and Tulsa. It plans to acquire a 46,428-square-foot warehouse near 83rd Street and Kansas Highway 7 in Shawnee as a manufacturing facility and grow from eight to 24 employees in three to five years.

The climate-controlled facility will let ElevenTen focus on the finer details and safety, in addition to drastically reducing construction time, which ensures faster completion, Anderson said in the release.

Wetzel said ElevenTen is well-positioned to support construction of projects that fall in a gap between three-story suburban garden-style apartments, traditionally built with wood-frame construction, and high-rises above 12 or 13 stories, constructed with steel and concrete. Beyond higher project returns, he said the end result could be denser development in greater Downtown and other urban cores growing throughout the Midwest.

"Kansas City is the perfect example of a second-tier city that is really seeing a ton of reinvestment in its urban core," Wetzel said. "Those are the locations that (ElevenTen's products) will be perfect for: those second-tier cities that are seeing densification, are seeing revitalization, but are not New York (or) suburban greenfield sites."

Wetzel noted that he as been in design and construction since 1994.

"I've worked on a lot of great projects, both as an architect and as a contractor," he said. "I've never been as excited about something that can literally transform the way these kinds of projects are built."