Where this service starts
Capital works on a commercial property — a refit, a system replacement, a tenant fit-out, a major refurbishment, an extension — sit in an awkward space between three groups. The owner wants outcomes for a budget. The consultants want to specify a scope they can stand behind. The contractor wants enough margin to deliver without losing money. Without someone bridging the three, things drift.
Our role is to be the person on the owner’s side of the table who has done this enough times to know where the drift comes from, and who has the time and authority to head it off.
Pre-construction
Most projects we manage start with a brief that’s looser than it should be. We work that brief into something a consultant team can quote against: what problem are we solving, what does “done” look like, what’s the budget envelope, what’s the timeframe, what’s the consenting pathway.
From that brief we select the consultant team — architect or designer, structural engineer where required, services engineer, quantity surveyor, planner or consent specialist if the consent pathway is complex. Twenty-five years in Auckland commercial property means we know which consultants do strong work in office, retail, industrial, mixed-use, heritage. We pick by fit, not by who’s available.
Tendering
For most works we run a selected tender to a shortlist of at least two, preferably three trusted contractors we’ve worked with before. Open tenders sound fair on paper but usually deliver the bid that misunderstood the scope the most, not the one that priced it best.
Tender analysis is more than picking the lowest number. We look at the contingency allowance, the schedule of prime cost and provisional sums, the programme assumptions, and the contractor’s recent workload. We then negotiate the contract — usually NZS 3910 with appropriate special conditions — and execute it on the owner’s behalf.
During construction
Variations are where projects bleed. Every variation gets logged, priced, approved or rejected against the agreed change-control process. ARIA tracks the variation register in real time so the owner sees the running total against budget, not a surprise at month-end.
Regular site meetings, monthly cost reports, and a clear line of communication to the contractor’s project manager. When a decision is required from the owner, it comes with a recommendation — not a list of options to pick from.
Tenant fit-out coordination
Tenant fit-outs are a special case. The lease will specify what the landlord delivers (the “landlord’s works”) and what the tenant fits out at their cost. The boundary between the two is rarely as clean as the lease implies. We coordinate with the tenant’s project team, manage the landlord-side approvals process, and release fit-out contributions only when the agreed milestones are documented.
Programme management and the owner decision points
A capital works programme has a small number of decisions that really shape the outcome — the consent strategy, the contractor selection, the sequencing of work around live tenants, and the final account negotiation. We surface each of these to the owner with a recommendation, the rationale, and a clear deadline for the call. Everything else runs without taking up your week.
During delivery, our default reporting cadence is personalised to your requirements — typically a weekly or fortnightly report (programme, cost, variations register, issues escalated) and a longer monthly review including a forecast to completion. If a project is in trouble, you’ll hear from us before the next scheduled report — not at it.
Closing the project — properly
The project doesn’t end at practical completion. There’s the defects liability period, the resolution of PC and provisional sum items, the consent sign-off, the warranty pack, and the final account. We close each of these deliberately, not by drift. A project that’s 95% closed for two years has a habit of becoming the consultant’s problem instead of yours, and that’s fine — but you should know what’s still open and why.
What you can expect from us
A single point of contact — Lo. A consultant and contractor base earned over twenty-five years in Auckland. Monthly cost reporting against budget, with the variations register attached. A defects period managed all the way through to PC sum reconciliation. And the final account closed properly — not left to drift past the end of the project.