Negotiated General Contract

In most instances, the Negotiated General Contract is the preferred project delivery method. Staalsen completes most of our projects as a Negotiated General Contract.

Here is how it works

A general contractor’s fee (%) is agreed upon with the client. Then, Staalsen obtains multiple competitive bids in each trade category and provides the client and architect an “Open Spread Sheet” of received bids.

The client gains the advantage of competitively low bid prices plus the benefit of a general contractor as a building team member early in the project development. As part of that team, Staalsen can then provide value-engineering advice, preliminary cost estimates from layouts or schematics, and economic decisions on alternate materials, systems, and designs. This process leads to keeping the project on budget and reduces the frequency of change orders.

Advantage

This method avoids the potential problem of completing the drawing set, putting the project out for competitive general contract bid, and then finding that the project as drawn is over budget. Therefore, the client has paid for a set of drawings for a building they cannot afford to build.

Our negotiated general contract with open-book accounting provides the best value and transparent processes—so you can have confidence that you built the best project at the lowest possible price.