If you are developing a hotel, converting a mill or fitting out a serviced apartment block, the procurement route you pick shapes your budget certainty, your programme and how much time you personally spend firefighting. The choice usually comes down to two routes: design and build, where one contractor carries the design and the construction, or traditional, where you appoint the design team and then tender the finished drawings. Neither is automatically better, and the right answer depends on how fixed your brand standards are and how early you need a reliable number.
Under traditional procurement you appoint an architect, structural engineer, M&E consultant and quantity surveyor directly. They work the design up to a full tender package, usually RIBA Stage 4, and contractors price the same drawings. You keep design control and you own the design risk. If a detail is missing or wrong, that is a variation and you pay for it.
Under design and build, you set the brief, often through a set of employer's requirements plus a concept design, and one contractor takes responsibility for developing and delivering it. Any consultants you have already appointed are usually novated across. You get a single point of responsibility, which matters a great deal when a bathroom pod supplier and an M&E subcontractor start blaming each other over a riser clash.
Design and build gives you a firmer number earlier, but that number carries risk pricing. On hotel work in the North West, expect a contractor to load somewhere in the region of 3 to 8 per cent for design and unknowns when the information is thin. The more developed your employer's requirements, the smaller that margin becomes, which is why spending properly on Stage 2 and 3 design usually pays for itself.
Traditional can tender keener because contractors are pricing a defined scope with less to guess at. The catch is that your final account often lands above the tender sum. Variations of 5 to 15 per cent are common on refurbishment and conversion work, particularly in older Manchester and Liverpool buildings where you cannot see behind the plaster until you open it up.
Hotels earn nothing until they open, and an opening date that slips past a peak trading window is expensive in a way most other buildings are not. Missing the Manchester conference season or a summer city break period can cost more than the saving you chased on the build contract.
Design and build lets construction start while later design packages are still being finalised, which can pull four to twelve weeks out of a programme on a mid sized scheme. Traditional needs the design substantially complete before tender, so on a 100 bedroom project you are typically adding two to three months up front, though what you get for that is a much clearer picture of what you are buying.
Write your employer's requirements properly. Vague documents are where design and build disputes begin. Be explicit about acoustic performance between bedrooms and corridors, fire strategy and compartmentation, brand FF&E schedules, and the operator's back of house requirements. If your brand mandates a particular door set or bathroom pod, name it.
Factor in local realities. Manchester city centre sites often have severe access constraints, and Section 278 highways agreements with the council can take longer than people plan for. Building safety regulator gateways now sit on the critical path for higher risk buildings, which for a tall hotel means design changes late in the day are far more painful and expensive than they used to be. That pushes many developers towards two stage design and build, where the contractor is in the room early enough to influence buildability rather than just price the consequences.
For refurbishment of an existing building, traditional or two stage design and build usually works better, because unknowns behind existing fabric are hard to price blind and a fixed lump sum will simply carry heavy risk allowance. A provisional sum approach for the unknowns, priced openly, tends to be fairer to both sides.
Yes. Most schemes novate the original design team to the contractor, so the people who developed your concept carry it through. You can also retain your own client side adviser to check that what is being built still matches your brief.
As a rule, get to RIBA Stage 2 or 3 with a clear set of employer's requirements before you go out. Less than that and you are handing the contractor the pen on decisions that affect guest experience and your operator agreement.
Tell us about your site or scheme and we will come back with a route to delivery, whatever stage you are at.