Easy to transition from wood frame development work to concrete?

Really hoping someone has a thoughtful response to this.  I'm curious.

This is so funny, 3-years ago concrete prices went up and we all had to shift at looking at stick-built.  Now how the turn-tables...

Take my comment with a grain of salt because my concrete experience is from construction and my stick frame experience is from development, so I don't have a perfect apples-to-apples comparison. I love working in concrete, mostly because the product I've seen is nicer, but there are some other benefits as well (sound attenuation is a big one). A few of the differences I've noticed that may be relevant as a developer is as follows:

- Building systems will be different, so there are different issues that come up in coordination, permitting, etc. If the building is tall enough you will probably need special pumps for the water/sprinkler systems, you're probably moving from a punch window setup to curtain wall, like the Ricky Rosay mentioned staging becomes a huge deal (I had a project in a downtown area on a tricky street where we had to do midnight pours because that was the only time we could get the concrete on site in time), etc. 

- Schedule is always driven by the structure, but here you now have the physical reality of concrete curing that is a limiting factor. Depending on the mix design you need to wait a few days before staging anything on new concrete. If you are using post-tension slabs you need to also consider stressing schedules. You can't start work immediately underneath because you need to wait until your concrete breaks come back from the lab for you to strip the framing. All of these items should easily be taken care of by a good GC, but it's important to know as a developer that the schedule is less flexible than wood framing because of it. 

- You want your architect to coordinate everything beforehand. Bring in a BIM specialist if you have to. Once concrete is set (especially if you have PT slabs) it's difficult to add sleeves for missed risers or additional service if you want to change things. You can always core but it's a whole process and there are limits to where and how much you can core. 

- If you ever even think about exposed concrete immediately forget it. After you've done that, if you still want to use exposed concrete realize that it's a huge pain the ass. The biggest thing you want to make sure is you get the GC/concrete sub to do mock-ups, everything from the mix design to form ties to the form joints will change the way it looks (even as much as if the rebar is too low it will "bleed" through and you can see the pattern in the concrete). Concrete is a fascinating material and one of the more interesting properties is it will pick up anything that it cures against. Whatever is on the form will be on the concrete: leaves, pencil drawings, even the pattern of the formwork (if you're using plywood you can see the wood grain of the plywood, this is actually used to cool effect if you are using "board forms") so you need the GC/subs to make sure no one is drawings measurements or notes (or penises or swastikas...) on the forms or else you'll have to spend a bunch of money to scrub it off and it still won't look great. 

Fun story from my exposed concrete experience, we had an exposed concrete ceiling and took all the necessary precautions I outlined above, but it still came out looking weird. The reason? The slab was 7,000 PSI concrete and the columns above were 10,000 PSI, and the different mixes had slightly different colors, so when the concrete set there were pools of the darker 10 kip concrete among the lighter 7 kip. Nothing we could do, that was just the look of the ceiling. 

lool

I haven’t read the responses and I’m sure many people here are more knowledgeable than me. However; as a developer, mostly focused on the business side overseeing my construction team - development is about problem solving. The materials are somewhat irrelevant. You’re engineers and construction people will discuss the risks or you need to figure out what they are via conversation. From there it’s cost. Development is problem solving and having your BS meter turned high enough to know when someone is blowing smoke.