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Basement Contractors of Oklahoma built a basement market in an area of the country where lower-level living was unheard of. On the eve of its 500th basement project, the company continues to offer quality engineered basements while showing off its talents above ground in energy efficient residential and light commercial structures.

In 1994, Mike Hancock gave up his job as a project manager with a nuclear power plant to put his engineering background to use in the residential building industry. He moved to Oklahoma where he noticed basements didn't exist the way the rest of the country knew them. He saw the typical Oklahoma foundation company offering unreinforced stem walls - small, 6-inch-thick, 12-inch-high walls filled with sand with a concrete floor poured on top. Hancock explains requests for basements were built off the stem walls and resulted in more of a storm shelter that builders would call a basement. "It lacked reinforcement, waterproofing, drain tile and a sump pit - all the things we would normally do for a house with a basement," he says. Hancock says these "basements" had water problems, and residential basements never took off in Oklahoma.

On the commercial side, Hancock saw underground parking garages and shopping malls with walk-out basements. This signaled to him that basements were a possibility in Oklahoma. "I saw an opportunity to do something new, and I started building houses with basements," he explains. "Builders took notice of what I was doing. I was buying the cheapest lots, which were cheap because they had slopes to them so I could do walk-out basements. Soon they started asking if I could do that for them."

Basement Contractors of Oklahoma succeeded in building a basement market in Oklahoma, and now builds about 70 residential basements each year. And Hancock doesn't just build the basements - he offers engineering services to homebuilders so they know how to treat the site when his basement crew is gone. He has taught classes for the local building community through the PCA and a local concrete supplier where he runs through a slide show presentation to explain to builders the physics of proper basement building, backfilling around the foundation after the basement contractor leaves, and how to handle landscaping.

"We've taken the approach of selling the whole vehicle instead of just the tires," Hancock says. "Drainage, waterproofing, flatwork - we give them everything related to the basement and they just need to do the framing."