Overview
National restaurant brands build to a fixed prototype. The building is decided before anyone breaks ground, which means the variable is the site, and the site is where the schedule is won or lost.
Key Construction served as general contractor on ground-up restaurant construction for Panda Express in Southfield, Michigan, delivering a 2,438 SF store with full site development on one of the city’s busiest commercial corridors.
Scope
- Site development and utilities
- Concrete, framing, and structural work
- EIFS and stone veneer exterior
- Electrical, plumbing, and mechanical systems
- Roofing and all interior finishes
- Painting self-performed
- Coordination of owner-contracted signage and Allen Industries exterior architectural elements
Relocating Live Service Under an Active Site
The site came with an electrical duct bank running through it, and that duct bank was feeding the building next door. It could not simply be removed, and the neighbor’s power could not go dark while a restaurant got built around it.
Relocating live service is slower and more exacting than installing new. The existing route has to be located and verified in the field rather than trusted to a drawing, the new route has to be built and proven before anything gets cut over, and the utility and the adjacent owner both have to agree to the window. Every other trade on the site works around that sequence until it clears.
Access was the second constraint. The store sits on a heavily traveled commercial street, which means deliveries could not simply show up. Material arrived on scheduled windows coordinated against traffic, with staging planned in advance because a truck waiting for a place to unload is a truck blocking a lane.
Key Construction sequenced both constraints into the schedule rather than absorbing them as delays, keeping the duct bank relocation off the critical path of the building work.
Outcome
2,438 SF store with full site development, completed in 2026. Key Construction is currently completing a second Panda Express location and bidding a third.
