Home Architects :Secret to Controlling Home Cost: Home Value Engineering

Online, January 27, 2010 (Newswire.com) - Rand Soellner Architect = home architects. They are luxury residential architects, timber frame architects, post and beam architects and they design mid-sized comfortable lakefront homes, rambling giant mountain castles, and cozy compact cottages in your hometown, too. In a recent press release, they made their commitment to home architecture known by publishing their website address: www.HomeArchitects.com . They have been helping their clients with home value engineering for decades. They now reveal this Home Value Engineering Secret to everyone. Rand Soellner AIA has experience dating back 40 years, on over $3 billion worth of projects for the United States government, NASA, states, counties, municipalities, major theme parks and individual homeowner clients. Now everyone can benefit from Soellner's experience as home value engineering architects.

© Copyright 2010 Merry Soellner, All Rights Reserved Worldwide. Anyone is hereby licensed to copy this press release in its entirety, including copyright notices, for informational purposes.

As an example, on one recent timber frame home project, the costs were cut in advance, by 28%. What is interesting in the Soellner home value engineering approach is: this cut was made BEFORE the project went out for pricing. These cuts were built into the home architects documents Before they hit the contractor's desks. How could this be? What is Soellner doing to proactively help clients get more bang for their buck, without the unsettling shock and cutting that has been the norm for home design, bidding and pricing for millennia?

Home Architects Secret: Home Value Engineering :

Home architects should listen to everything their clients want, then put them in the architectural documents in a certain way. This special way is to preassign what elements should be in the Base Bid Pricing documents and what should be in Owner Optional Upgrade Packages. Rand Soellner Architect has 4 upgrade packages for every project. Here is how the summary should look:
A. Base Bid
B. Owner Optional Upgrade Package 1
C. Owner Optional Upgrade Package 2
D. Owner Optional Upgrade Package 3
E. Owner Optional Upgrade Package 4

The home architects need to exercise their judgment to help clients obtain at least the basic project, things above that level are enhancements. By separating out the upgrade niceties, the home architects are helping their clients understand the economic implications of their desires in hard bid numbers from builders, then allow the clients to make choices if they wish to pay for those upgrades. This requires skill, knowledge and work on the part of the home architects, but clients will believe it is well worth it, when they save tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands or even millions of dollars on their homes, by putting them in the financial driver's seat. This level of choice making should in the hands of the homeowners and only home architects can put it there.

Soellner prefers to empower his clients with this ability. It is this proactive approach that avoids the dreaded "Come to Jesus Meeting" that awaits most homeowners, contractors and architects who have gone down the typical path of providing everything the clients have asked for in the architect's documents, with no care as to what should be Base Bid and what should be options. Why? Because there is a belief on the part of many homeowners that they can get whatever they want for whatever price they want, once it crosses a certain threshold, like a million dollars, or $500,000 or whatever. The reality is: contractors work hard for their money and costs are costs and they will charge for what is shown on the architect's documents. If the documents are not prearranged into Base Bid and Optional Packages, there will be one huge mind-numbing price for everything, that is sure to antagonize any homeowner, whether they have indicated a particular budget or not. Once this occurs, then comes spirited discussions and the eventual Cutting. Cutting = amputations, which are never pleasant. Having Owner Optional Upgrades to ADD is more pleasant. That is Soellner's approach. Most residential designers and home architects do not have the experience to accomplish this approach. Soellner has done it this way for decades, so it is second nature to his firm, passed down from large commercial projects in their background.