Adaptive re-use can be a significant strategy for achieving sustainability as it ensures a continuous building life-cycle and prevents it from destruction. Adaptive re-use projects have their own unique environment and specific challenges to ensure success. There are complex designs and construction problems unique to adaptive re-use projects thus specific skills and expertise are required. As Australia’s building stock ages, more and more attention are being turned to adaptive re-use projects and the critical factors towards its success. The literature review identified and regarded project management as a critical success factor for these projects. Given the extremely complex and conflicting construction challenges we contend that construction management is a critical success factor. The aim of this paper is to identify the unique problems in the adaptive re-use process of historical buildings. It is a highly specialized field with significant learning accumulated and significant levels of intellectual capital created within the project teams. Two case study projects with similar project teams are examined to explore the relevance of the concept of reflexivity. We propose an intellectual capital model for project success to understand how to capture, transform and accumulate intellectual capital within project stakeholder’s communities who are dedicated to adaptive re-use projects. The model is a step towards the development of a practical construction management methodology grounded in theory and empirical observations.