Allowances, tested
Every allowance read against the scope it is meant to buy, not last year’s rate. An allowance is a promise to spend, and the gap between that and the real cost is the first change order.
Home Services Rapid GMP Review
A rapid GMP review when the signature date is inside two weeks
When the signature date is inside two weeks, we find the largest exposures first. The amendment is drafted, the lender wants it executed, and nobody outside the contractor team has read the price.
The question it answers
What am I about to accept, and what must I ask before Thursday?
Why it happens
Why a rapid GMP review starts with five documents
Exposure is not spread evenly across a price. Most of it sits in a handful of pages that can be read in days.
The amendment and exhibits
The guaranteed maximum price, the completion date and the exhibit list. A wrong revision on a drawing list is a different building at the same number.
Exclusions and qualifications
The page that decides what the ceiling covers. It is usually short, usually read last, and each line moves a scope or a risk back to the owner.
Allowances and changes
Where the price is a placeholder, who controls the contingency, and how every change will be priced and marked up for the rest of the job.
Why owners take this one
Most of the money sits in a small number of lines
The commonest reason an owner calls us is not doubt about the contractor. It is a date. The amendment is drafted, counsel is reviewing the terms, the lender wants the executed document, and it becomes clear that the commercial content of the price has been read by the people who wrote it and by nobody else.
A full reading is three to four weeks. If you do not have three to four weeks, the choice is not between a full review and a rapid one. It is between a rapid one and none.
What makes the short version worth doing is that exposure is not spread evenly. On a typical guaranteed maximum price between ten and a hundred and fifty million dollars, three to five lines carry most of what can go wrong: an allowance set below what the scope behind it will cost, a qualification that quietly moves a scope back to you, a contingency with no rules about who spends it, and a completion date with no float behind it. Those are readable in days.
Turnaround
Five to ten working days. Fees are quoted per project once we have seen the documents, never as a percentage of what the review finds.
What is in it
What you get, item by item
Qualifications, tested
The list attached to the price, read as what it is: a scope definition written by the party giving the guarantee. Each one marked with what it moves back to you and its value.
Who controls contingency
How much, whose it is, what it may be spent on, whether you see the drawdowns, and what happens to the balance at the end. Four of those five are usually left unwritten.
One GMP Risk Register
Every finding on one page, ranked by dollars, each citing the document and page it came from. Short enough to take into a meeting and specific enough to argue from.
One call before you sign
Forty five minutes to walk the register through, with your counsel or your owner’s representative on the line if you want them there, before the signing date.
The change mechanism
How every change will be priced for the rest of the job: the markup tiers, the rates and the notice periods, read now rather than on the first change order.
Where it stops
What this package does not do
What a package is worth depends as much on what it refuses to do as on what it covers, so the limits are on the page rather than in the engagement letter alone.
What we leave out
The schedule logic, the interfaces between trade packages and the change order machinery. All three matter, and all three need more time than this package has.
What that costs you
Findings that depend on the drawings or the baseline schedule come back marked as less certain, and we say which ones and why rather than overstate them.
When to buy the full review
If you have three weeks before signature, buy the full review. This package exists because you often do not, not because it is the better product.
How it runs
From the documents to the decision
We work back from your date rather than quoting a duration and letting you discover the collision later.
Day zero
You send the draft amendment, the schedule of values and the qualifications list, plus anything else you hold. A document that does not exist yet is a finding.
Days one to six
We read the commercial set against itself and against whatever drawings came with it. No questions to the contractor unless you ask for them.
Days seven to ten
The register comes back ranked by exposure, followed by the call. You sign, or you go back into the room with something specific to ask for.
Before you commission it
Questions owners ask
If the answer to any of these decides whether the package is right for you, ask us before you commission it rather than after.
Is ten days really enough?
For the largest exposures, yes. For the schedule and the package interfaces, no, and we say so on the front page of the register rather than letting the omission pass unnoticed. What you get is the most valuable third of a full review, delivered in time to use.
What if we have four days, not ten?
Tell us the date before you commission anything. Sometimes four days is enough to read the allowances and the qualifications and nothing else, which is still worth having. Sometimes it is not, and we would rather say that than take the fee.
Can we upgrade to the full review afterwards?
Yes, and the rapid work is not repeated. What we already read carries across, so the full review picks up at the schedule, the interfaces and the change exposure rather than starting again from the beginning. You pay the difference between the two fees, not both of them, and the register you already hold becomes the first section of the larger one.
Does the contractor find out we commissioned this?
Not from us. We are not a party to your contract and we do not approach the other side for documents, explanations or anything else. Everything we read comes from you. What you then do with the register is entirely your decision, and most owners use it to choose which three items to raise rather than sending it across.
What you end up with
What you have before Thursday
Two documents, delivered in time to use them.
A ranked red flag register
Each exposure with its page reference and a likely cost range, in the order it is worth spending negotiating time on.
A one page memo
The questions to put to the construction manager before signing, written so you or your counsel can take them into the room without us.
A clear upgrade path
If there is more time than expected, the full review picks up where this one stopped. You pay the difference between the fees, not both.
| Fee | Fixed, quoted against a named document set listed in the engagement. Not hourly. |
|---|---|
| Payment | Fifty percent on engagement, fifty percent before the final deliverable is released. |
| The clock | Delivery starts when the complete document set arrives, not when the engagement is signed. |
| Included | One kickoff call and one readout call. |
| Turnaround | Five to ten business days from the complete document set. Inside five business days on request. |
Ten days is short. It is not the same as nothing.
Compare the four
One
See all four side by side
The four packages draw on the same modules and the same method. What changes is scope, speed and who the memo is written for.
Written from the same desk
Three notes behind this package
Short pieces on the mechanisms this package is built to catch, written from the owner side of the contract.
The other three
Bought in four different shapes
Every package runs the same method and the same registers. What changes is how much of it runs, how fast, and who the document has to survive being read by. The packages overview sets the four against each other, and the four modules describe the work itself.