How To Save on Construction Costs Before Ground Breaking

Today, everyone is looking to save on construction costs. Construction company C.W. Driver Cos. uses a value engineering strategy to save costs for all construction projects without sacrificing on design or quality of the property. Value engineering starts before ground breaking, when builders can work with developers to find out where costs can be curbed. Some of these methods include polished concrete flooring, standing seam metal panels in place of aluminum composite metal panels, and vinyl windows.

“In a market with ever-increasing labor and construction costs, pricing is unpredictable,” David Amundson, project executive at C.W. Driver Cos., tells GlobeSt.com. “We take a target value approach for all of our clients but particularly for higher education facilities. If you tell us what the program is that you are trying to accomplish, we will figure out a way to get you there. When we make many of these changes, no one will know the difference in the end product except for the people behind the scenes. Ultimately, we are trying to find avenues to get the end user a better value for the same program that they are after.”

While this strategy is applicable to every asset class and development type, C.W. Driver typically uses it on higher education projects, where budgets are predetermined and inflexible. “On a higher education project, you have DSA approvals, and once you have those approvals, you don’t want to make changes and have to go back to get approvals,” says Amundson. “That is a big concern. You don’t want to lose that time. If we can get early enough to effect change before it is being designed, the project only has to be designed once.”