Oltmans Starts 10,000th Job in Southland

Whittier-based Oltmans Construction Co. has become one of the nation’s largest general contractors--based in the nation’s hottest housing market--without taking the slightest interest in residential construction.

The company, founded by J. O. Oltmans, who came to Los Angeles from Illinois in 1922, was incorporated in 1946. This year, the company is celebrating the start of its 10,000th job, a $12-million, four-story medical office building for Cabot, Cabot & Forbes’ Health Services Group, at the Queen of the Valley Hospital in West Covina.

Followed Fire Trucks

With an annual volume of more than $150 million--enough to rank it 133rd in the nation in the Engineering News-Record magazine of April 17, 1986--Oltmans has come a long way from the repair work that the late J. O. Oltmans obtained by following fire trucks.

Oltmans Chairman Robert M. Holmes said that residential construction is cyclical, dependent on rising and falling mortgage interest rates and is about 90% non-union.

“Commercial work is much less dependent on interest rates, is much steadier, with few peaks and valleys and is almost entirely unionized,” he said. “It’s difficult for one firm to do both, and we’ve left residential work to the specialists.”

The 88,000-square-foot medical building, designed by the architectural firm of Hill Pinckert Inc. and scheduled for completion late this year, is being constructed with a steel frame, but Holmes said that more than 60% of Oltmans’ output employs the tilt-up concrete form of construction, with walls poured flat on a slab and lifted into place with cranes to form the building.

Tilt-up Construction

“Tilt-up construction was developed in Texas in the late 1940s, but it really took off when California firms like Oltmans and O. K. Earl improved the technique and ran with it,” Holmes said.

“With the help of innovative architectural firms like Hill Pinckert in Irvine, we developed two- and three-story mezzanine research-and-development/office buildings by molding, adapting and architecturally treating tilt-up panels so that they could accommodate extensive amounts of window area and exterior treatments demanded by image-conscious high-tech firms.”

Holmes, with Oltmans for 35 years, credits the architectural innovations with multi-story tilt-up construction for helping create the R&D;/office buildings that are the mainstay of business and industrial parks throughout the Southland.

“Tilt-up buildings today can appear to be all glass, defying distinction from the far more expensive steel-frame structures,” he said.

Major Company Projects

Among the Oltmans firm’s current projects are the 255-acre Gateway Corporate Center for Zelman Development Co. in the Diamond Bar area; the 67-acre Heritage Park project for O’Donnell, Brigham & Partners in Santa Fe Springs; a four-story office building for the Lewis Co. in Sherman Oaks, and the five-phase, 32-acre, 596,000-square-foot Ontario Interchange Business Park for Western Realco, Newport Beach.

Oltmans has just completed a 178,000-square-foot distribution facility in the Dominguez Hills area near Carson for Samsung, a South Korean electronics firm.

In Orange County, the company is building a 115,000-square-foot regional facility for Unisys (the company formed by the merger of the Sperry and Burroughs computer firms) in the new town of Rancho Santa Margarita.

The firm has built a wide range of structures, from the Old North Church at Forest Lawn Hollywood Hills to the 550,000-square-foot regional facility of Hughes Aircraft Co. in Long Beach to the manufacturing facility of Everest & Jennings in Camarillo.

In order to serve firms such as Everest & Jennings that have relocated from Los Angeles County to Ventura County, Oltmans opened an office in Westlake Village. The firm has about 450 employees in Whittier and Westlake Village, with all but about 100 employed in the field, Holmes said.