Every Project Costs Money
People know that every project has materials, labor, and equipment costs, but people often forget about the cost of design, permitting, and management fees. All of these costs and fees can be reasonably predicted, and the more you know about the project details, the more accurately you can predict project costs.
People may opt out of including something to try and save money, but excluding important things like permits fees and design when needed, commonly has unintended circumstances. So how can the owner save on construction costs? on small jobs, you can manage the project yourself and save the cost of a General Contractor.
Owner Representatives or Owner Agents use special tools and systems and inject objectively comprehensive knowledge to streamline how projects are designed and built, saving time and money. By helping you make the right decisions the O.R. is the most effective way to keep costs low.
An Owner Representative is worth much more than the cost and can cost less than a General Contractor.
The following calculator helps you see how fees affect the amount available to purchase material and labor. Input a project budget in the green field on the calculator and using the drop-down-boxes on the left, “include” or “exclude” the Fee items to see how the costs consume your project budget.
This calculator simplifies the fee calculation, so fees shown may not reflect actual project fees.
It is intended to showing how various fees can affect the project budget and illustrating the point that: Owner Representation saves more money than it costs.
Here is a little more about the logic used to build the calculator:
- The percentages reflect common project averages.
- Owners legal, unique conditions, special costs, and owner purchased items are not included because they are too project specific to average for this model.
- Contingency is 15% of the project budget, but commonly fluctuates between 5% and 20% cost of construction.
- Savings realized using an O.R. is reflected in an average reduction in design and contingency.
