The project pencils, and it’s still the project.

Value engineering has a bad name because it’s usually done late and done crudely.

Called in after the number comes back high, with a mandate to find a percentage, it tends to remove whatever is easiest to remove, which is often the thing that made the product sell, or the thing a board attached a condition to.

Done early and done properly, it’s a different exercise: finding the cost that isn’t buying you anything.

Where the money usually is

• Grading and earthwork. The largest single swing on most sites, and the one most sensitive to layout decisions made before anyone was thinking about dirt balance.
• Infrastructure sizing and routing. Utility runs, stormwater approach, whether a facility is regional or distributed.
• Layout. Lot yield against street length is a ratio, and small changes to it move real money.
• Materials and sections. Where a spec exceeds what the jurisdiction actually requires, which happens more often than you’d think, carried forward from a previous project in a different town.

One thing about our fee

Our development fee is set off the approved budget at contract, not off actuals. So when this work takes cost out of your project, you keep all of it. We are not paid more for a project that runs expensive, and we don’t take a share of a saving we found.

We mention it because a percentage-of-budget fee from a firm that also sells value engineering is a fair thing to be suspicious about, and the answer is better than the suspicion.