Your Contractor Manages the Job. Who Manages Your Contractor?
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 attorney. This is the other half: the people on the construction side.
On a capital project, four parties sit on the owner’s side of the table or close to it: the general contractor, the engineer or architect, the community manager, and sometimes an owner’s rep. All four are professionals. All four work hard. They are not all working for the same thing, and the gaps between them are where most of the money leaks out of HOA projects.
The simplest way to sort it out is to ask two questions about each seat. Who does this person owe? And what are they actually paid to do?
The four seats
1. The General Contractor: works for the contract.
The GC has a contract with the association, so in one sense it works for you. But its obligation is the contract: build what is drawn and specified, at the price it bid, on the schedule it agreed to, and get paid. A good GC manages its subs, crews, safety and schedule very well. That is real management, and it is the GC’s job.
What the GC is not paid to do is protect the association’s money against its own invoice. It is not going to tell you a change order is priced high, that the scope it bid has a gap it can fill later at a better margin, or that the pay application is running ahead of the work. That is not a character flaw. It is which side of the table it sits on.
2. The Engineer or Architect: works for the design.
The design professional writes the scope, drawings and specifications, and owes the association a professional standard of care. If you bought construction administration (CA), they also answer contractor questions, review submittals, and visit the site periodically to observe whether the work generally conforms to the design.
Read that last sentence carefully, because the words matter. Periodic, not daily. Observe, not inspect every square foot. Conformance with the design, not management of the budget. CA usually does not include negotiating change order prices, running the bid process, tracking the contingency, checking lien waivers, writing resident notices, or holding the schedule. And on many HOA projects, CA was the line item that looked optional, so it was cut or never bought.
3. The Community Manager: works for the association, on everything at once.
The manager is the person the board actually calls, and on most projects is the only continuity on the owner’s side. But look at the management agreement. Construction administration is almost never in it. The manager is running 6 to 10 associations: budgets, collections, violations, meetings, vendors, and the resident who emails at 11 PM. When a project lands, it lands on the manager by default, not by assignment, and the manager absorbs the blame for a role they were never hired or paid to fill.
4. The Owner’s Rep: works only for the association.
An owner’s rep has no design to defend and no work to sell. The job is the business of the project on the owner’s behalf: turning the design into a biddable package, running and leveling the bids, working the business terms of the contract alongside your attorney, reviewing every change order for need and price, checking pay applications against work in place, tracking issues, holding the schedule, keeping the board and residents informed, and closing the project out.
What an owner’s rep is not: your engineer of record, your attorney, or your contractor. I don’t stamp your design, I don’t give legal advice, and I don’t swing a hammer. The value is that I sit on your side of the table and nobody else’s.
What the job actually looks like
On the idea that an owner’s rep repackages what a GC does: a GC manages its subcontractors for its own contract. An owner’s rep manages the GC for the owner. Same activity, opposite side of the table.
On the idea that engineer CA is the real oversight: it is real oversight, of the design. The easiest way to show the rest is a real log. This is the issues log from one of our projects, a high-rise condo balcony repair, six months into a twelve-month schedule. Names left out.
86 issues logged in six months. 68 closed, 18 still open. Every one has a location, photos, a person assigned and a due date. A sample:
A credit nobody asked for. The specified drains turned out to be oversized for the conditions. The general contractor proposed a smaller, lower-maintenance unit, which was a good call. We made sure it came back as a deduct change order, because a cheaper product should mean a lower price.
“Complete” that wasn’t. A drip detail was reported complete and was not. On enclosed balconies where the work gets buried, we asked for photos of every key step. We got six, none showing the coating application. That item is still open and managed.
Rework on rework. Partition panels rejected for open seams, removed and replaced, then rejected again for finish.
Residents’ homes. Five items for damage at units: scratched doors, carpet pulled up by protection tape, a bent sliding-door track. Each was logged with a fix or a reimbursement request.
Notice and schedule. Unit access without the advance notice the contract requires, and a two-week schedule handed over five minutes before a board meeting. The board and our team ended that meeting rather than approve sequencing nobody had time to review.
Safety. An open balcony edge with no barricade, debris falling onto the balcony below, loose guardrail panels flapping all weekend.
A few of those items are squarely engineering questions, like rebar cover below the 3/4-inch minimum on an overhead repair, or how much existing coating has to come off before new coating goes on. This is why it's invaluable to have an owner's rep with engineering experience on the team. Most of the log is not engineering-related. It’s the business of the project: prices, credits, proof, residents, notices, schedule, safety follow-up, and getting decisions in front of the board in a form it can act on.
None of this makes it a bad contractor. A log like this is normal for a year-long repair in an occupied building. That work happens on every project whether or not anyone is hired to do it. The only question is whether someone on the owner’s side is writing it down and closing it out.
Budget for both, and size it to the project
The board’s job isn’t to do any of this. It is to make sure each function has a name next to it before the contract is signed. In practice:
Buy the engineer’s CA when you buy the design. Price it as its own line, not as an afterthought after the bids come in.
Decide who owns the business of the project. Bids, change orders, pay apps, schedule, resident communication, closeout. If the answer is the manager, put it in writing and pay for it. If it isn’t, hire it.
Carry both as soft costs in the project budget. Not out of the contingency, and not out of a reserve line that was sized for construction only.
Size it to the project. A $40,000 sealant job doesn’t need four professionals. A $2 million envelope repair running 18 months does.
Engineer CA and an owner’s rep aren’t competitors. On a well-run project they lean on each other: the engineer tells me whether the work meets the design, and I make sure the association pays the right amount for it, on time, with the paperwork to prove it.
The bigger point
Every one of these people is doing their job. On most troubled HOA projects, the problem isn’t that somebody failed. It’s that the job nobody was hired to do still needed doing.
Four seats, one check: for every task on the project, can the board name the person who is paid to do it?
If you’d like the one-page Capital Project Role Card I use to map who does what across the GC, engineer, manager and owner’s rep (scope, bids, contract, submittals, change orders, pay apps, schedule, resident notices, closeout, warranty), plus a blank version of the issue log template we use, comment “ROLES” or send me a DM.
Sean Davis, PMP | Civil Engineer | Current HOA Board Member (12 years) | DHA Construction Management | Broomfield, CO
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