Owner’s Guide
Change Order and Cost Control
Change orders are where owner capital quietly disappears. Some are legitimate, unforeseen conditions, owner directed changes, code driven requirements. Many are not, and get bundled in anyway if nobody is checking. An owner's representative reviews every change order request against the original contract documents, drawings, and scope, negotiates pricing instead of accepting the first number, and tracks the cumulative impact against your budget and contingency in real time instead of finding out at closeout what got approved along the way.
The best change order is the one that never gets submitted. On The VIV, a 254 unit development in St. Petersburg built as two residential towers on a shared parking podium, early coordination with the GC, JE Dunn, on shared structure and MEP routing prevented the rework that a shared podium linking two independent towers typically creates at every phase transition. That is cost control happening before construction, not after a change order request lands on your desk.
Once construction is underway, the discipline shifts to tracking, not just catching. On Aster & Links, a 418 unit mixed use development in downtown Sarasota, clear buyout scopes and milestone based reporting kept capital partners aligned on progress and cost through the full 23 month build, so cost impact was visible in real time instead of surfacing as a surprise at the next capital call. That kind of reporting only works if someone is reconciling it against the contract every month, not just forwarding what the GC submits.
Across a $500 million plus portfolio, active management of change orders and construction costs protected $4.5 million in owner capital. That is not a one time save, it is what disciplined oversight looks like applied consistently across every project, whether the risk shows up as a rework avoided before it happens or a change order negotiated down after it lands.
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