If I were an owner I would love Building Information Modeling (BIM). I love looking at the nice 3D modeling, watching a fly-though on the computer screen. BIM is great being baffled with the brilliance that is pretty pictures. I would like to get a feel for how my project is going to look I [...]
Is there room in the construction market for cheap? After all, cheap really has a couple of meanings. How about when cheap is low in price and worth more than its cost? This has a place in the market for the buyer. The phrase, “I bought it cheap!” can be thought of as bragging when [...]
Protecting the Owner’s GMP Interests In some respects auditing a GMP contract for the owner should not be necessary. The owner has placed their trust in a firm that has promised to look out for their interests on the project. So why bother to audit? Well, there are many reasons. A simple reason would be [...]
We extend our best wishes for a happy holiday season and a new year of joy, peace, and prosperity. Our blog will resume January 4th.
The major types of projects that we saw in 2011 by quantity were split between privately funded and public funded. By dollar amount the public money far outweighed the private money that was being spent. Utility projects stayed unchanged for us. The big gain was seen in the amount of claims that we have seen [...]
I recently attended a breakfast educational meeting. It involved a panel discussion on construction. The panel members were an architect, contractor, subcontractor and an attorney. It focused on project delivery methods and some of the problems associated with the various types. The one common thread, for all of the problems discussed, was the lack of [...]
I recently overheard a contractor bragging to others on how they could have a cost advantage over their competition. This caught my attention. So I listened. It seems in their bidding practices they priced materials/equipment items that were not approved in the specifications. They would not request these items to be approved in the bidding [...]
There are several levels of market pricing in the construction industry today. These markets generally are the open competitive bid, invited competitive bid, competitive negotiated, sole source negotiated and specialty bid market. These markets may involve firm price or cost reimbursable terms. The least expensive market for owners today is in the open competitive bid [...]
Six joint venture teams recently bid on a $500+ million government project. There were over 10 amendments during the bid period. Each bid set cost over $4,000 and the amendments were extra! They won’t hear any results for a minimum of 4 months. Also the project is unfunded. This means that it can’t be built [...]
I was recently reading forecast on what was expected for 2012 in the various construction markets. Some are expecting contract values to slightly increase from 2011 levels. Some see no increase. My thoughts are that there will be a decrease from 2011 to 2012. It may be a bit simplistic but 2012 may well be [...]
