What we read
The same set you hold, read against itself rather than one document at a time. Most findings sit in the space between two documents, which is why reading them separately produces a clean report and a surprise later.
Home Who we work for Owner representatives
Owner representatives accountable for a price
You are accountable for a price you did not build up, on a schedule somebody else wrote. What you need is a document, not a second opinion.
The position you are in
A document survives the meeting, an opinion does not
Even a representative who has run forty projects is reading a document assembled by a party with a commercial interest in how it was assembled, on a timetable set by somebody else, alongside four other jobs.
The client is not asking whether the estimate is good. The client is asking whether you are comfortable, and your comfort is the deliverable. Comfort that rests on your own reading has to be taken on trust, and a client who takes it on trust will ask again in month nine.
An independent reading changes what you are offering. Instead of your judgment, you are offering a document. Documents survive personnel changes, board meetings and the passage of time. Judgment does not.
What you usually ask us
The four questions we hear most
Every one of them is answerable from documents you already hold, which is why the reading runs without asking the contractor for anything.
- Can I hand this to my client without caveats?
- What did I miss that a specialist would catch?
- Where does my exposure sit if this price moves?
- Will this stand up if somebody reads it back to me in two years?
How it works for you
What we read, and what you get
What you get
A register addressed to the owner, not to us. Every line carries a dollar figure, a page reference and a recommended position, so it goes into a client pack without rewriting.
What we never do
We do not produce a competing estimate, we do not give legal opinions and we do not comment on whether a detail is buildable. A document that stays inside its lane is one you can pass on without a covering explanation.
Written for you
Three pieces from the same desk
Short notes on the mechanisms behind the questions above, written from the owner side of the contract.
What an independent review should contain
Defending a number in front of a board
When you and the client disagree about a risk
Defending a number in front of a board
When you and the client disagree about a risk
The other three
One position, four different rooms
The register is written the same way every time. What changes is who the memo has to survive being read by. The overview page sets out all four side by side.