For PE-RE founder Caitlin Summers, gratitude for her adopted community comes with a responsibility to help care for its future.
When Caitlin Summers moved from Maryland to Palm Beach County with her husband and infant son, the decision was largely practical: They wanted to be closer to family. What she hadn’t expected was how quickly a new address would become a place she felt responsible for.
“Our home is in Wellington and our office is in West Palm Beach, and somewhere in the first year it stopped being the place we moved to and became the place we belong,” she says. “I don’t think you can plan for that. It was given to us.”
That welcome has shaped both her family’s life and her approach to business. After years of traveling for projects, Summers is putting down roots in a place where her professional decisions carry personal weight. Her son will grow up here. The buildings she helps bring to completion will become part of the landscape of their lives.
Summers is the founder and managing director of PE-RE, an owner’s representation and construction project management firm based in West Palm Beach. The firm works for businesses, developers, institutions, investors and private clients, guiding projects on their behalf.
“My role is to sit on the owner’s side of the table, which in practice often means being the person who holds the line on what was promised when there’s pressure to let it go,” she says. “That’s most of the job.”
That pressure can arrive long after a project has earned approval and the public presentations are over.
“From where I sit, character isn’t lost at the zoning hearing,” Summers says. “It’s lost eighteen months later, in a trailer, when the budget is tight and decisions get made quickly.”
She describes compromises that can accumulate during construction: a thinner landscape buffer, a cheaper material on a street-facing facade, a courtyard repurposed to accommodate deliveries. Each may seem manageable on its own. Together, they can leave residents looking at something considerably different from what they were shown.
For Summers, protecting those commitments means putting them in the documents that govern the work. A rendering can illustrate an intention. The contract documents need to establish what is expected.
“Almost everyone begins with good intentions,” she says. “The question is whether those intentions are written down somewhere they can’t be quietly removed.”
Her perspective comes from a career spanning more than 20 states, Puerto Rico and Canada, much of it involving renovations and build-outs in occupied spaces where businesses remained open and neighbors lived alongside active job sites.
That work taught her to consider construction from the perspective of the people experiencing it. A team may see progress against a deadline. Someone next door may be counting mornings interrupted by deliveries or wondering where customers will park.
Truck routes, dust control, working hours and parking for tradespeople, Summers says, should all be addressed before construction begins. When they are overlooked, the neighborhood absorbs the consequences.
Honesty about timing matters, too. Residents can prepare for disruption when they know what to expect. Repeated assurances that work is nearly finished, followed by another delay, steadily erode trust.
In Palm Beach County, Summers understands why people feel protective of their surroundings.
“People raising their hands aren’t being obstructive; they’re being protective,” she says. “Protective is what you want from neighbors. It’s the same instinct that makes this a good place to live.”
She believes developers should invite those voices into the process early enough to influence decisions. Summers also credits local government with a transparency and willingness to engage residents that she has not encountered everywhere she has worked.
One project involving the conversion of 21.5 acres from agricultural to light industrial use put that philosophy into practice. Summers says the prospect of jobs and economic opportunity drew interest, but residents questioned whether the surrounding infrastructure could support the change.
Their concerns centered on roads, capacity and truck traffic. In response, she says, infrastructure improvements became central to the plan.
The experience reinforced her belief that listening requires a willingness to change the work. Explaining a project’s merits is only part of earning support; people need to see how their concerns have influenced the decisions.
Summers also resists the assumption that preserving a community’s character means standing still. She sees Palm Beach County’s culture as an asset that thoughtful growth can strengthen. The challenge is creating lasting opportunity while respecting what already makes people want to live here.
Her Christian faith informs that outlook. She returns often to stewardship: the belief that what a person has been given comes with a responsibility to care for it and eventually pass it on in better condition.
For Summers, that idea has become inseparable from her gratitude for the place her family now calls home. Having spent much of her career arriving in other people’s towns for a project and leaving afterward, she values the accountability that comes with staying.
Giving back, in her view, happens in the daily decisions made on behalf of clients, the commitments protected under pressure and the consideration extended to people beyond the job site.
“Skylines photograph beautifully, but nobody actually lives in a skyline,” she says. “People live on a street.”
Asked what she hopes her work will mean in 20 years, Summers thinks about her son, who will be an adult by then.
“I’d like him to be able to point at something we were part of and be glad it’s there.”
My role is to sit on the owner’s side of the table, which in practice often means being the person who holds the line on what was promised when there’s pressure to let it go.