$1.78M SDE Water/Wastewater Contractor, 25+ Yr.

A general engineering contractor based in Riverside County, CA that builds and rehabilitates water and wastewater infrastructure for public agencies across Southern California: treatment plant and filter rehabilitation, well equipping, booster pump stations, lift stations, storage tanks, standby generators, and mechanical installations such as bar screens and conveyors. Site work and park projects fill in around the plant work, and every job is bid fixed-price.

Customers are municipal and district water and wastewater agencies, plus a private water utility whose closely held approved-contractor list has supplied roughly a quarter to a third of annual volume against a much smaller field of bidders. Awards come one contract at a time rather than as recurring accounts, though agencies that have used the company before keep routing new projects to it for bid, and prequalification with multiple public entities is already in place.

Day to day, a general manager with an engineering degree oversees project management, job costing, scheduling and the office, supported by a degreed project manager, an assistant project manager, two estimating assistants, an office manager and three field foremen whose careers each run past 35 years. Many field employees have been in place 15 years or more. The owner works 24 to 40 hours a week as chief estimator and safety manager, so a buyer should plan to add or develop estimating capacity.

Equipment and vehicles, the agency prequalifications, the completed-project record and the in-progress contract book transfer at closing. Best suited to a civil, utility or paving contractor moving into Southern California, or an operator who can qualify for the contractor's license and bonding.

Disclaimer:
Unbroker LLC does not guarantee the accuracy or completeness of the information provided in this listing, as it is supplied directly by the seller. Prospective buyers are strongly encouraged to conduct their own due diligence. Any real estate represented as part of this transaction is sold directly by the business or property owner and not by Unbroker LLC.

Retirement

Operations run from roughly 2,600 sq ft of leased office space in Riverside County, CA at $3,120 per month, rented from a party related to the seller, with yard and storage for the fleet. Roughly $650,000 of equipment and vehicles is included: Kobelco, Hitachi and Caterpillar excavators, Caterpillar backhoes and loaders, Bobcat skid steers and compact excavators, a John Deere mini excavator and skiploader, a vibratory roller, trailers, work pickups and office equipment. There is no inventory to purchase and fixed facility overhead is light against contract volume, so a buyer inherits a working fleet and a lean cost base rather than financing either. Two personal-use vehicles are excluded from the sale.

The seller will provide a structured transition covering estimating, safety administration and the insurance and bonding relationships, and has committed to financial incentives that keep key long-tenured employees in place. A buyer will need to add chief estimating capacity and qualify for the contractor's license and bonding.

Demand comes from aging treatment plants, regulatory compliance deadlines and supply-reliability projects funded out of public agency capital budgets rather than discretionary consumer spending. The owner counts roughly a dozen bidders in this Southern California water and wastewater niche and about four he considers genuinely strong. Most solicitations require bidders to document comparable completed projects of similar size and scope within a recent window, so more than 25 years of plant, pump station and well-equipping work acts as a qualification barrier newcomers cannot shortcut. The private utility's approved-contractor list is a further screen and a less price-driven channel. Public work is still awarded on low bid, so reputation and qualifications widen access to opportunities rather than guarantee awards.

Three levers the owner identified but never staffed remain open: school district projects, where prequalification thins the bidder pool and solicitations run continuously; an asphalt paving division, attractive because material-heavy bids carry a lower labor-to-material cost ratio; and state transportation work, which issues more projects than any other public agency and often prices time-and-materials instead of hard bid. Adding a second estimator is the practical unlock, since the completed-project record already qualifies the company for larger scopes than it routinely bids. A buyer with its own bonding capacity and management bench could run the same crews and equipment into adjacent Southern California counties.