Andrey Cunha was working as a mortgage broker and a real estate broker, with construction as a part-time sideline, when the housing market fell between 2008 and 2010. As real estate and mortgages went down, he moved toward the side work, building homes and remodeling them.
“That’s how everything started,” he says.
He now owns Dream Remodel Construction LLC, based in Fort Myers, and holds a Florida certified general contractor’s license, number CGC 1531356. He has no partners. More than 60 people are on his payroll, he says.
The license is what holds the range of work together. Cunha says the company is known for remodeling in general, including build-outs for new commercial tenants, and he names Sprouts and Starbucks among the corporate jobs. The company also remodeled a 158-room hotel in Palm Bay, he says. On the residential side there are high-end custom homes on Marco Island and elsewhere, new homes, and what he calls “a lot of kitchen and bathroom remodel all day long.”
What a general contractor sells is coordination. The company describes its role as keeping plans, permits, engineering, inspections and the trades moving toward one finished result, and it marks out its home territory along the Gulf Coast from Naples to Punta Gorda. One homeowner who ran a large interior renovation from another state credited Cunha with coordinating several jobs that fell outside the contract so the house came out the way the owners wanted.
At Cunha’s size, that work is split up. He assigns a project manager to each job, while the company still presents itself as owner-led, with Cunha following every project.
His own pitch is short. “I sign a contract, I deliver on time, I deliver it as I promise,” he says.
The LLC itself was formed in 2021, according to its Better Business Bureau file, but Cunha traces his building career to the downturn that pushed him toward construction. The next shock did not land the same way. During the pandemic, he says, the work actually got much easier, and his explanation is four words long.
“Everybody needs a GC,” he says.