Cost & project management

If you own infrastructure, you need to maintain it effectively and allocate sufficient funds to do so.  The consequences of continually deferring maintenance are serious, will lead to business continuity issues and, at worst, health and safety compromises.

Facilities maintenance is crucial to keeping deferral costs down and preventing premature building failure, and what is most important is to ensure the right maintenance is carried out as effectively and efficiently as possible. In order to achieve success in facilities maintenance, and effectively mitigate risk and improve outcomes, a business should always consider these seven keys.

An update to Marlon Bray's March post on how the pandemic would impact construction costs and escalation on the short, medium and long term.

​It’s very common for developers, contractors and consultants to estimate construction cost escalation, for all asset types and trades, based on a single number or range. This is dangerous and can lead to grossly inaccurate development budgets and forecasts, and more time (and money) spent on contingency plans down the road.

Reductions in on-site labour, temporary construction shutdowns, and new site working protocols due to the COVID-19 pandemic, will cause the real estate and construction industry to feel the effect of this virus for months, and possibly years to come. The following identifies some of the risks, and provide some guidance on key strategies that owners and developers can follow going forward.

Ongoing answers to your questions about CMHC's Rapid Housing Initiative. This program was launched to address housing affordability and homelessness in Canada's most vulnerable communities.

Managing infrastructure project delivery risks in the ‘new environment’ requires an appreciation of current developments and how these changes affect infrastructure projects moving forward. What are the current risks and/or influencing factors? And, how could these be mitigated in the near and long term?

With infrastructure projects, there are always a multitude of unknown risks and activities that occur during the conceptual development of the project and surround the project feasibility/planning and procurement phases.

Cost estimates are one of the best problem-solving tools an owner, design team and construction manager have at their disposal. However, they are often treated as a formality, pulled together for compliance, when the wealth of information that is contained is often lost and rarely fully-leveraged to the extent it should.

With a desire to keep soft costs down, there is a reluctance amongst owners to invest more in the design and tendering phases of the project development. However, spending a bit more on the design team prior to construction seems to make a lore more sense, especially with millions of dollars in savings being left on the table.