SoCal Power Women: Suffolk Construction's Karri Novak On Building College Campuses Of The Future

This limited series profiles SoCal Power Women who have helped shape cities, neighborhoods, businesses and lifestyles in Southern California. These women will be honored at Bisnow's SoCal Power Women event Dec. 14.

Karri Novak has been in construction for almost three decades, many of them with the same company. But during the coronavirus pandemic, she re-evaluated her position and decided to look for a new job, ultimately landing at Suffolk Construction because of the firm’s openness toward new technologies and innovations.

She’s been with the company for about a year, serving as vice president of construction development. 

Suffolk’s work on the West Coast has predominately been in multifamily residential development, though she's also been tasked with helping the company diversify into more sectors, including hospitality, life sciences and higher education. 

The latter is an area of expertise for Novak. Although she has worked on projects across sectors, from Cars Land at Disney’s California Adventure to a hospital at Camp Pendleton, for the past 10 years, Novak has been focused on student housing, specifically at UCs, CalState schools and community colleges.

“It's a fun area to focus on because it really is all-encompassing for the project sites — there's sports complexes, there's academic buildings, there's research labs, there's student housing,” Novak said. Two of Novak’s three children are current college students, giving her an added perspective on the sector. 

But the pandemic was also a challenging time to try to make inroads into student housing or campus projects. That kind of student housing is revenue-generating for the schools, so when students got sent home, coffers took a hit, Novak said.

“There were many projects that were in some stage of design or in the contract-awarding phase that got put on hold because campuses were unsure of their financial conditions,” Novak said. 

Now that students are, in most cases, back at school and on campus, Novak said she’s seen those on-hold projects come back and is already seeing an influx of new projects on campuses that are coming out to bid, a positive indicator that schools are feeling better about their ability to pay for these projects. 

Suffolk is among contractor firms bullish on prefab or modular projects for student housing, with several proposals and projects in the works. Although it's not typically cheaper to do modular on a college campus, Novak said there are other benefits: a shorter construction timeline, less disturbance to the campus, fewer traffic disruptions and generally reduced impacts compared to traditional construction projects. 

Suffolk has also used prefabrication and off-site construction strategies for other sectors and markets, like a Moxie hotel project in the Bay Area. Other spots of innovation used at Suffolk include a robot that takes 3D images of construction sites so a client can see the work in progress without having to come to the physical location.

“It's been very refreshing to come and work in an environment where innovation is really at the forefront of the business,” Novak said.