CREJ - Office Properties Quarterly - April 2015
While the design-build approach is often associated with small, fast-track projects or large, complex government projects, it is just- as beneficial to office building projects where speed to market is critical to developers. Nowhere is this truer than with Colorado’s white-hot office market with its extreme competition for top-tier tenants. In a design-build project, teams are responsible for the entire office undertaking, from design to estimating to construction. This approach produces efficiencies that result in higher-quality buildings that are free of cost overruns and schedule delays. Moreover, the design-build approach eliminates the inefficiencies of the traditional designbid-build approach and gives developers a competitive advantage by bringing projects to market faster. A good design-build team views the project from a developer’s perspective, knowing that a successful project requires a responsible design solution. In the design-build delivery model, architects and engineers collaborate with the preconstruction and construction team, from the concept stage of the project onward in order to meet the developer’s pro forma objectives. In the conventional delivery model of design-bid-build, project team members assume they will have access to developer contingencies to cover change orders as the project progresses. These unforeseen problems increase the developer’s cost and competitive risk and put them in the middle of the conflict resolution, between the architect and the contractor. Conversely, design-build teams focus on target-value design and strive to complete the project without dipping into contingencies through early and ongoing collaboration. The overarching benefit of the design-build approach is centered on the concept of maximizing value through a collaborative model. It’s a developer-oriented approach that maximizes project pro forma opportunities to produce a high return on investment and to make it easier to obtain financing and early tenant commitments. The approach to building office complexes provides clear benefits for developers. These include reduced schedules, higher building quality, greater tenant flexibility and results in few (if any) project-delaying change orders.