Top Owners

By Scott Judy

In this issue, Southeast Construction presents its first-ever coverage of "Top Owners." For this inaugural effort, the magazine has assembled a compelling collection of information.

First, readers will see that we've provided a few rankings of the Southeast's top owners and developers. These lists are drawn from McGraw-Hill Construction's Dodge database of project information known as The Network. Ranking is based upon the total value of projects in the Network's database for firms located in the magazine's four-state territory. The "Top Owner" rankings published here include one for overall projects, commercial projects and health care projects.

Additionally, we've included feature stories on four owners: The Related Group of Florida in Coral Gables; The Walt Disney Co. in Lake Buena Vista, Fla.; Cousins Properties of Atlanta; and The Ghazi Co. of Charlotte. While three of these four - Related, Disney and Cousins - have long, proven track records as truly important regional - and even national and international - builders, The Ghazi Co. is still rightly considered an up-and-coming firm. Even so, its $100 million EpiCentre project in Charlotte demands attention.

Owner-Driven Changes

Of course, owners are arguably the most critical component of any building team. Without an owner, a project doesn't get built. And it's the owner that every contractor, subcontractor and designer is ultimately working for.

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Now, as the costs of materials and manpower continue to escalate significantly, it may be up to today's owners to push and pull their construction teams into ways of getting their projects built more efficiently and face these issues head-on.

At least that's the implication of a new "Survey of Owners" conducted by FMI Corp. of Raleigh, N.C., and the Construction Management Association of America. According to FMI's announcement of the survey's results, "Owners are making changes that are revolutionizing the construction process."

That's because owners are realizing that inefficiencies in the way projects are managed add as much to their final cost as anything else.

In a statement accompanying the survey's results, Bruce D'Agostino, executive director with CMAA, said, "Owners are beginning to see how their own approaches to construction can actually foster inefficiency and raise costs, or, in contrast, how the right strategy can create the kind of collaborative and open working environment in which jobs are done quickly and done right."

Among the findings of the survey:

• Sixty-six percent of respondents use the design-bid-build delivery method most often, but only 23 percent believe this method offers the best value.
  
• Between 40 and 50 percent of all construction projects are running behind schedule. According to FMI, this finding is consistent with previous years' surveys, and there is increasing recognition that much of this delay results from project inefficiencies.
  
• Eighty percent of respondents cited timelier decision making by owners as the single most urgent improvement needed in the construction process.
  
• More than a third of owners said they felt their project controls were not adequate, citing project management and cost controls as areas most in need of improvement.