DHA
Construction Management

You signed the contract in November. The crew starts in April. In between, the board sent a congratulatory email, the manager forwarded the insurance certificate, and everyone assumed the rest would sort itself out on the first morning. It does sort itself out. Just not in your favor. On a project with no kickoff, the rules get set by whoever shows up first: the crew that parks in the visitor spaces on day one, the foreman who picks the dumpster location, the resident who cal

Owner’s Rep, Engineer, Property Manager, GC Last week someone asked a fair question in a LinkedIn thread: if the engineer is already doing construction administration, why does a board need an owner’s rep? Isn’t that paying twice for oversight, or paying someone to repackage what the GC already does? A lot of boards ask the same thing quietly when they look at a project budget, so here is my answer. A few issues ago I wrote about the gap between the board, the manager and the

A friend with 14 years in defect repair recently posted a different view from mine on how HOAs should procure construction defect projects. Her post makes several points I agree with, so I want to answer it carefully. She is right that the lowest bid doesn't always mean the best value. She is right that a process fixated on the lowest number can produce scope gaps and unnecessary change orders. She is right that collaboration among the contractor, the engineer and the HOA's O

How to make a construction defect settlement fix more of your building Your association spent two or three years on a construction defect claim. Experts opened walls, cut test holes in the roof, and water-tested the windows. The case settled. Now there's a check in the bank and a board that has to turn it into a repaired building. In Colorado, what happens next is almost always the same. The repair goes to the construction company that did the intrusive testing. No bid-ready

It's month five of a nine-month project, and the association just held its annual meeting. Three of five seats changed hands. At the new board's first meeting, the questions start, and every one of them is fair: Why did we pick this contractor? Who approved that color? What is this forty-six thousand dollar change order doing on the agenda? Can we still change the railing? Nobody in that room was there for any of those decisions. The two returning directors remember the outco

You're standing in your kitchen on a Saturday morning with a cup of coffee, and you hear a drill. Someone you've never seen is mounting a box to the outside of your building. Nobody told you they were coming. Nobody told your board. There's no work plan, no notice, and no agreement on file that says who fixes it if it leaks. I'm watching this happen right now at a condominium association I work with. It is not an isolated incident. There is a fiber construction wave rolling a

An owner in a condo community is under contract to sell. Two weeks before closing, the buyer's lender comes back and says the project doesn't qualify. Not the buyer — the project. The deal dies. The owner is furious, the manager is fielding calls, and the board is genuinely baffled, because the thing the lender is asking about is a balcony repair the association already assessed for, already collected on, and already built. Two years ago. The board's reaction was exactly righ

(Part 2 of two. Last week was everything you can settle with a gauge, a straightedge, or 48 hours and a piece of chalk. This week is everything you can't.) Two board members are standing on the same balcony, looking at the same railing, on the same afternoon. One says it looks like crap. The other says it looks great. Both of them are sincere. Neither is being difficult. The contractor is standing ten feet away waiting to know whether he's getting paid for this phase, and the

(Two-part series. This week: the criteria that have numbers behind them. Next week: the ones that don't — color, texture, profile, and the arguments nobody wins.) Here's the scene. It's three weeks after the balcony coating went down, it rained overnight, and there's a puddle on unit 12. A unit owner photographs it and calls it a defect. The contractor says every deck holds a little water and it'll be gone by noon. Both statements sound reasonable. Neither one is a standard.

The letter shows up in month four. It's polite, it's on letterhead, and it's addressed to the board. "Please be advised that the Contractor has incurred twenty-two days of compensable delay attributable to Owner-caused conditions, including delayed submittal approvals, restricted site access, and unavailability of the designated laydown area. A change order request follows." The board reads it twice and lands somewhere between confused and annoyed. Then the meeting happens, a

Here's the meeting. Some version of it is happening in a clubhouse somewhere this week. It's the second week of September. The board approved the exterior repaint in June, the RFP took longer than anyone expected, the contract got signed in August, and the contractor can start the last week of the month. Everyone's tired of the topic. Somebody says the sentence that shows up in every one of these meetings: "If we push this to spring, we're looking at another eight months of i

Here's a conversation I've had more times than I can count, in some version, at some community, in some month of budget season. The roof is leaking again. The board gets two numbers: $38,000 to repair the failing sections, or $210,000 to replace it. The room does the arithmetic everyone does — replacement is five and a half times the cost — and votes for the repair. Reasonable. Responsible, even. Nobody wants to be the board that spent $210,000 when $38,000 would do. Two year

"Sean, my business has been around for 50 years, and we are as solid as can be. Nothing's gonna happen. You have nothing to worry about." I was sitting across the table from the owner of the company, negotiating the contract for a major project at a community I represented. I'd pushed back on terms that put far too much of the risk on the association, and that was his answer. Not a counterargument — a reassurance. Fifty years. Solid as can be. Six months later, my phone rang.

Your contractor just told you the project doesn't need a permit. That one sentence has cost more HOAs more money than almost anything else I see — and the bill always shows up later, at the worst possible time. Last time I wrote about who draws the plans — when your project needs a design professional and when it doesn't. This is what happens to those drawings next. Between design and construction sits a regulatory layer boards routinely skip past, usually because a contracto

The roof project was on schedule and on budget. The board still got 40 angry emails in week one. Nobody complained about the roof — they complained about the porta-john next to the mailboxes. Here's something commercial construction never has to deal with: your project site is also 200 people's home. They didn't choose the project schedule, they can't relocate for it, and they will absolutely tell you how it's going. Most of the friction on an HOA project doesn't come from th

Your roofing contractor just offered to "take care of the specs" for free. That free favor might be the most expensive line item on the whole project. I've written before about apples-to-oranges bids and change orders that eat contingency funds. Here's the uncomfortable truth: most of those problems are born before the first bid ever goes out — at the moment the board decides who defines the technical scope. Let's talk about when that person should be an independent design pr

Most of what I write about—bid leveling, contractor interviews, closeout—happens after a board has decided to do a project. But there's a decision that comes before all of it, and it quietly determines whether your community is ready when that roof, those roads, or that pool finally wears out. It's your reserve study. And if it's sitting in a drawer getting dusted off once a year at budget time, it isn't doing its job. Here's the uncomfortable backdrop: an analysis of more th

When I first joined my HOA's board of directors, I had one mission: keep the monthly assessments down. I thought I was the hero. Every budget meeting, I was the guy pushing back on increases, looking for places to trim, proud that our dues were lower than the community down the road. I genuinely believed I was protecting my neighbors' wallets. I was doing the opposite. It took me a few years — and a few painful capital projects — to understand that a board obsessed with keepi

Every HOA construction project has a part you can't see coming: the damage hiding behind the surface. Rotten sheathing under the stucco. Soft decking under the roofing. Corroded framing behind the siding. You don't know how much is there until the contractor starts tearing things off — and by then, the leverage has quietly shifted away from your community. Here's how we handle it instead. The wrong way: a price now, a surprise later The instinct is to ask the contractor for a

We've spent a lot of time in this series on choosing the right contractor — leveling bids, scoring intangibles, and avoiding the risk traps before you sign. But there's a quiet layer of paperwork that sits underneath all of it. Get it right and you'll likely never think about it again. Get it wrong and it's the thing that surfaces the day something goes sideways. Here's what your board should actually be asking for before a contractor sets foot on your property. Insurance: Do