Cost & project management

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.

Answers to help developers safely navigate the current and potential impacts of the coronavirus pandemic on active construction projects.

What are the potential short, medium and long-term construction cost outcomes of the COVID-19 pandemic

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.

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.