The quickest way to experience cost overruns with any project is to jump on the change order train. While yes, sometimes change orders do become necessary, the vast majority can be eliminated with careful planning and good communication.

As you prepare for your South Florida office buildout, keeping change orders to a minimum needs to be a priority. Here’s how to do it.

 3 Ways to Minimize Change Orders

Some of the easiest ways to minimize change orders to a Florida office build are to follow through on things you and your construction team should be doing anyway: paying attention to details, being diligent during planning and partnering with experienced professionals. Here are some examples:

1. Hire a construction consultant or owner’s representative to oversee part or all of your buildout – The number of decisions that need to be made during pre-construction is almost too many to count. While it’s important to have a trusted general contractor leading the charge, it’s also advantageous to have an owner’s representative or construction consultant at the table. Construction consultants may join or exit a project at any point, but if there’s ever a time to hire one, it can be especially valuable during the planning phase. When smart decisions are made early on, the likelihood of change orders occurring during construction drops significantly.

2. Insist on a constructability report – As discussed in Part 2 of preparing for your office buildout, a buildability report is a key way to identify any potential obstacles that could get in the way of constructing the project as designed. Constructability reports help minimize delays during construction, improve the overall project quality and design, and reduce change order requests. 

3. Don’t ignore qualification statements – When contractors include a qualification statement in their bids, it’s because they believe essential components are missing from the proposal that would need to take place in order for the work to be completed as proposed. These statements can be a way for contractors to raise a red flag for you with your project design – and this is a good thing. If you receive a document from a GC qualifying their scope of work as part of the bid, consider the transparency as a positive sign that your contractor is being forthcoming about potential hurdles to your project and follow up with questions. Getting them resolved now will benefit your office buildout in the long run in the way of a better design and fewer change orders.

Change orders are never simple, which is why it’s best to avoid them at all costs (literally and figuratively). If you want help with that, get in touch with our teams at Seacoast Consulting Group and Seacoast Construction. We’re different from the rest, and our clients appreciate us for that.