Michael Stern

By Michael Stern, JDS Development Group A bid set for an unusual building goes out to a short list of contractors, and the first thing that comes back is a list of questions. Sometimes that list runs to several pages, and it arrives well before the date the numbers are due. Developers, construction managers and architects working on buildings with few precedents learn to read it as the first honest feedback the documents have ever had. Reading it that way is possible only because competitive bidding has a formal question period built into it. That period exists for a reason worth understanding before the first answer gets written. Why Bidding Acquired a Formal Question Period Competitive bidding rests on a single assumption, which is that every firm pricing the work is pricing the same work. The assumption holds only if every firm is reading the same documents and reading them the same way. Nothing about a drawing set guarantees that on its own. A drawing is a description o...

By Michael Stern, JDS Development Group Photo by camera obscura on Unsplash A lot on an assembled site can carry floor area that no survey of that lot will ever show. The area arrived from a neighbor, it lives in an instrument filed with the office that keeps the land records, and the only place it can be proved is the record of title. This is written for developers, land use lawyers and underwriting professionals who have to establish how much building a site actually holds before a design exists. On the sites I work on the buildable envelope is assembled rather than found, and the assembly is legal before it is physical. The document that performs it is a recorded declaration, and everything the tower is permitted to be rests on that document being drafted and filed correctly. What a Development Rights Transfer Actually Records A transfer of unused floor area is not a conveyance of land. Nothing about the boundary of either lot changes and both owners keep their parcels. ...