The Owner Team

Owner Team – Members:

• Owner (Captain)
• Owner Agent (Co-Captain)
• Lender
• Insurance Agent
• Inspectors
• Legal Counsel

Owner Team – Responsibilities

The owner is any person, group, or company that is paying the bill. The owner is the overall team leader, ultimately responsible for defining, approving, directing, and paying for all design and construction work on the project. In other words, the owner is the reason the game exists and has ultimate responsibility over the outcome of the project.

The owner has additional members on the team who may help protect them from errors, omissions, or design and construction team misdeeds. These additional members include owner agents, lenders, permitting agents, insurance agents, inspectors, and legal counsel.

• The owner agent, or project manager, provides the owner with objective, impartial construction management expertise and project leadership.
• The lender provides loans to the owner in order to finance a construction project.
• Insurance agents help ensure the owner has adequate and necessary insurance protection.
• Inspectors ensure assemblies are properly constructed.
• Legal counsel helps legally protect the owner, as laws tend to change over time and differ from state to state.

Owner Team – Objectives

The Owner Team wants a headache-free, high-quality project built in the shortest amount of time and for the least amount of money possible. Often unsure where to begin and lacking in construction expertise, owners are desperate for people they can trust. In residential and light commercial construction, most often, owners rely on the contractor who seems to offer the lowest price and/or has the best referral. Unfortunately, as we’ll talk about in the bidding and construction phases, a contractor doesn’t always have the owner’s best interest at heart.

Owner Team – Issues

The owner’s main issues during the construction process are usually a lack of understanding, knowledge, experience, tools, a structured system, and poor project planning skills. As a result, owners usually jump into the building process trusting that the architect or contractor will help make the project run smoothly, only to find out once construction has begun how difficult things can become. Owners who are acquainted with an architect, or hire the architect first, tend to trust the architect more. Owners who are acquainted with a contractor first will tend to trust the contractor. To say that all architects and contractors are bad would be wrong—they are not. Many are superb, most are very good, and like in everything else, some are terrible. Many owners just roll the dice and hope for superior guidance. Construction Conductor combats an owner from blindly following the advice of the first construction professional they meet. The system gives you the knowledge necessary to stay ahead of the game.

A failed construction project is an expensive way to learn. Often owners end up believing they picked the wrong contractor, when in reality the breakdown occurred when the owner failed to realize that the best way to successfully complete a construction project is to start with a well thought-out, organized, and managed pre-construction plan. A pre-construction plan is essential to laying the foundation for a successful project.

TIP: Avoid disappointment by doing your homework and staying realistic.