JULY 2022 marketplace.” “In our early years, we were doing a lot of tendering, but we were finding that a lot of the projects we tendered on would never get off the ground, because the designs were miles over clients’ budgets,” Michael explains. “A lot of the time, after going through the tender process, the gap between the client’s budgets and the cost of building would just be too big to wind back,” he says. “As a result, I would say at least a third of all the projects we tendered on in these formative years never progressed beyond the drawing board. They never saw the light of day because they were just too far in excess of what the client could spend. There was a big disconnect between what architects would design and what the clients could afford.” “So we saw this massive void in the industry,” he says. “We saw that it would be in the best interest of the clients to get the builder involved in the initial stages of design development.” The benefits of design + construct – the project delivery system – are numerous, affording to Michael. The biggest benefit, however, is the cost control. All too often, architects or building designers will create house plans without careful considerations of a client’s budget or requirements. Often that would result in the project not even going forward, as Michael and his team experienced, but sometimes construction would commence only for it to become clear that the design was missing important elements, and the client would be forced to pay extra to remedy those issues. With design + construct, however, both the design and building team work together from the very first day. Not only is there a “seamless transition between the completed design idea and the construction of that design,” Michael explains, but there’s also less room for error in the design or budgeting and less chance of expensive variations during construction.
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