Tilt-up industrial shell construction for warehouse, distribution, and manufacturing.
Class A industrial shells delivered at the clear height, dock count, and divisibility your leasing plan needs. We build for industrial REITs, private developers, and owner-occupants across distribution, light manufacturing, and multi-tenant flex — speculative or build-to-suit, with the schedule discipline your stabilized yield-on-cost depends on.
Tilt-up construction for bulk warehouse, last-mile distribution, light manufacturing, and multi-tenant flex.
Bentwood builds tilt-up shells across the typical industrial product mix: 100,000+ SF bulk warehouse with 32' or 36' clear, last-mile distribution with high dock counts and deep truck courts, light-manufacturing shells with process-utility provisions, and divisible multi-tenant configurations sized to the absorption profile of your submarket.
The dependency chain underneath every project — panel design, bed layout, cure timing, rigging plan, lift sequence, brace logistics, shell-completion punch — is invisible to most owners until it slips. Our job is to keep all of it running so your stabilized yield-on-cost lands where the pro forma said it would, and your leasing team can market the building on the date you committed to.
Panel Design & Casting
Panel layout coordinated with the structural engineer and the architectural elevations your tenant or broker is selling against. Bed sequencing tuned to crane reach. Embeds and connections detailed for the lift sequence. Cure windows planned around the construction calendar and the ambient-temperature envelope of your site.
Crane Day & Lift Sequence
Wind forecasting at four-hour intervals starting 48 hours out, lift-director discipline with documented stop-work authority, panel-by-panel sequence coordinated with bracing logistics, and pre-erection inspection of every embed before any panel leaves the bed.
Shell Completion
Roof system installation sized for your ESFR sprinkler design, slab finish with FF/FL tolerances tuned to the racking system, exterior caulking and weatherproofing, dock packages with leveler and shelter installation, and shell turn-over to tenant or TI contractor with documented as-builts.
Casting bed capacity sets crane-day timing more than any other variable.
Tilt-up panels cast in sequence on a temporary bed at the build site. The number of beds the site can hold, the size of each panel, and the cure window per panel together set when crane day can happen. Underestimating any of these compresses the critical path and forces costly schedule recovery later.
We plan casting bed layout during preconstruction. The structural engineer signs off on panel sizing. The concrete vendor sizes the mix and curing additives to the cure window you have available. Lift-point embeds get detailed against the rigging plan, not the other way around. All of this finishes before the first yard of concrete is on site.
Casting Discipline
- Bed layout coordinated with crane reach and lift sequence
- Panel size optimized for cure window vs. site footprint
- Mix design coordinated with cure temperature targets
- Lift-point embed placement and QC inspection
- Bond breaker application sequenced against ambient temperature and humidity
- Cure-time monitoring with field-tested cylinder breaks
- Pre-lift inspection of every panel before the crane shows up
- Casting log integrated with the project-wide procurement tracker
The single highest-risk day of any tilt-up build, run with the same procedural rigor as a data center cutover.
Wind forecast, rigging readiness, panel cure status, brace logistics, and lift sequence all converge into a 10-12 hour window. Mistakes here cost weeks of recovery and create insurance exposure that's almost always avoidable.
We approach crane day the way commissioning teams approach a live energization: documented procedures, defined go/no-go criteria, a lift director with explicit stop-work authority, and a back-out plan for every panel. We pre-rig the bracing kit, walk every panel embed, confirm cure-break test results, and check the weather forecast against the panel-stability window before the lift director takes the radio.
When that work is done up front, crane day reads as routine on the developer's progress report. Routine is what we aim for.
Crane Day Toolkit
- Lift director on every crane day, with stop-work authority
- Wind forecast checked at 4-hour intervals starting 48 hours out
- Panel-by-panel lift sequence documented and reviewed
- Pre-staged bracing kits and rigging gear, inspected pre-shift
- Cure-break results documented for every panel before lift
- Embed inspection sign-off before any panel comes off the bed
- Real-time progress tracking in the project portal
- Post-lift walk-through, brace check, and end-of-day report
Shell completion designed against the TI contractor's eventual scope.
Shell hand-off is where most tilt-up projects generate friction with the tenant or TI contractor. Slab tolerance issues, caulking gaps, dock height mismatches, and uncoordinated roof penetrations create schedule delays and arguments at substantial completion that erode the developer's margin.
We close shells with the TI scope already in mind. As-built conditions are documented to a tighter standard than most owners require. When the tenant's PM walks the building for the first time, the punch list runs in the tens of items rather than the hundreds.
Shell Completion Capability
- Roof system installation (TPO, EPDM, modified bitumen) sized for ESFR sprinkler design
- Slab finish: FF/FL tolerances per racking spec, joint sawing, sealer, hardener
- Dock leveler & door installation (mechanical & hydraulic), edge-of-dock packages
- Truck-court depth and turning-radius layout per equipment class
- Exterior caulking and weatherproofing
- Roof penetration coordination with future MEP and process-utility scope
- Site work, fire lanes, truck courts, trash enclosures, trailer storage
- As-built documentation handed off to TI contractor
- Substantial completion walk-through with sign-off in the portal
We built proprietary software no industrial-shell contractor at our size class has. It's why we can run multi-site tilt-up programs that others can't deliver on schedule.
Most shell GCs run on weekly email updates, PDF schedules, and a project manager's spreadsheet. Bentwood is the rare exception: we operate on a proprietary software platform we built ourselves, over years of engineering investment, specifically for the way industrial developers actually consume construction information.
This isn't a configuration of Procore. It isn't a SaaS we resell. It's our own operating system — written in-house, not licensed from anyone, designed around panel casting, crane-day execution, and multi-site portfolio coordination. No competitor at our scale has built it. The reason your development team has spent the last decade asking shell contractors for real-time portfolio visibility and getting weekly photo emails is that nobody else has been willing to make the platform investment. We did.
Your development director sees panel cast counts, cure-break results, crane-day forecasts, and shell completion progress across every site, the day the field knows. For a development director coordinating three to five sites at once across the Southeast, Midwest, and Texas, this is the difference between knowing your pro forma is on track and finding out at the quarterly review that two sites slipped.
Why developers care: Shell delivery dates feed lease commencement, tenant build-out start, and stabilized-yield calculations. When a panel cure slips at one site or a crane day moves on weather, that change cascades through the entire pro forma. We surface it the day it happens, with options, while there's still time to keep your stabilization date intact — because our platform was built to make that the default behavior, not a feature request we'll get to next quarter.
What your development team sees
- Panel status by site. Cast count, cure-break results, ready-to-lift status — across every active project.
- Crane day forecast. Wind windows, panel readiness, lift sequence — 7 days out, 48 hours out, day-of.
- Long-lead procurement. Roofing systems, ESFR sprinkler design, dock equipment, embeds — tracked from PO through site arrival.
- Shell completion progress. Per-site percent complete against the schedule of values, with risk flags.
- Multi-site comparison. Variance across your portfolio: which sites are running ahead, which are behind, why.
- Schedule risk, surfaced early. Substantial completion projections updated weekly against your stabilization model.
- Document trail by site. Panel design submittals, structural sign-offs, crane-day reports, as-builts — all searchable.
- Reporting cadence aligned with you. Quarterly development reviews, lender update packets, IC reports — pulled from the same source data.
If your current shell GC's idea of project transparency is a weekly photo email, this is what the upgrade looks like. Our proprietary software is the whole reason this experience exists at our scale — and the reason no competitor in industrial-shell delivery has caught up.
Industrial portfolios rarely sit in one metro. We're built for that reality.
The developers we work with are typically building in three to five metros at once across the Southeast, Midwest, and Texas: Atlanta, Dallas, Nashville, Indianapolis, Birmingham. Coordinating that many GCs (each with their own reporting cadence and quality variation) is a full-time job for a development director who'd rather be sourcing the next site.
We run one operating platform across every Bentwood project. Casting-bed planning, crane-day procedures, shell-completion punch standards: identical at every site. Your development team gets one PM relationship and one portal that shows panel counts, crane status, and shell-completion progress across your portfolio.
One Tilt-Up Standard, Every Site
- Same casting and crane-day discipline at every site
- Cross-site panel design reuse where applicable
- Centralized procurement: roofing systems, dock equipment, bracing kits
- One Bentwood PM across your portfolio, decentralized field crews
- Live visibility into every site's panel count, cure status, crane status
- Schedule risk surfaced 30-60 days before it impacts your pro forma
The platform is what lets us build tilt-up at portfolio scale without the quality dropping at site five. It's also what your facilities and development teams will quietly fall in love with after the second project comes in on time.
Have a tilt-up project on the boards?
We will review your site footprint, panel design, and pro forma schedule before discussing next steps.
Contact Bentwood