Protecting Our Utah Clients
Working with Bluerock Utah — Part Six
We have reached the end of our series of how to have a remarkable experience building with Bluerock, your Utah Custom Home Builder. Today we want to tackle how we work overtime to protect you, the client. If you haven’t read the previous posts, you can catch up here:
Protecting the client is one of the most critical things that a builder should be doing while working on a project. Builders should be more experienced with some of these things, and should be implementing industry best practices to protect their clients. Let’s talk about what we’re doing at Bluerock to ensure we are protecting our clients.
Owner-Contractor Agreement
We generally work on a cost-plus a fixed fee structure. If you recall from our relationship post, we covered the three different types of agreements and how they affect you as the client. To recap, there are three main agreements:
Fixed Price: This agreement favors the contractor as it gives them the incentive to cut corners so that they make more money.
Cost-Plus: This agreement favors the contractor and encourages them to go over budget, and discourage them from saving money in places they can.
Cost-Plus Fixed Fee: This agreement is where the builder gets a fair fee for their services, does not get paid more when the budget goes over (hello win for you!), and doesn’t get paid less when the budget goes under (winning again for you!).
Construction Industry Best Practices
We work with our network of skilled and professional subcontractors to ensure that the following measures have been taken to protect you:
— Design
For every project, we work with design professionals to ensure your design meets all applicable building codes and standards. When any structural work is needed for your project, we ensure a licensed structural engineer provides stamped plans and specifications. The same goes with any necessary civil engineering or grading if required for your build. Starting the project with a knowledgeable team of experienced professionals will protect you from problems that are very costly to fix after the project is complete. Learn more about our preconstruction process here.
— Safety
We also obtain a building permit with the local municipality for all of our projects, from Provo to Park City and beyond. We have all of our projects inspected and approved. This ensures every Bluerock project is built to meet or exceed all applicable building codes and standards for both life safety and energy efficiency.
— Licensed and Insured
Our entire team of Utah subcontractors is licensed and insured. Having a license ensures a certain level of competence in both their craft as well as knowing the basic principles of running a business. Being insured is a protection to us and you against unpredictable setbacks, negligence, or injury on your project. We require everyone we work with to carry both general liability and workers’ compensation insurance. As your builder, we have commercial general liability, automobile liability, workers’ compensation and employers’ liability, and also excess umbrella liability insurance. We can also add course of construction insurance (sometimes known as builders’ risk insurance) to your project upon request.
— Lien Wavers
Another industry best practice to protect our clients is collecting lien waivers. We collect lien waivers from subcontractors and suppliers at the time payments are issued to protect you and your property from mechanics’ liens. If you are unfamiliar with how a lien waiver works, it essentially protects you as the client from the risk of having to double pay for work completed on your project. For example, suppose a subcontractor paid by Bluerock fails to use their payment to pay their suppliers or employees. Those who were unpaid might file a lien on your property in the amount they are owed. You as the property owner would be required to pay the supplier or employees that had not been paid, even though you already paid Bluerock for that work. Since we collect lien waivers from everyone we pay at the time of payment, the subcontractor would be obligated by law to pay the necessary money to clear the lien.
We have industry leading subcontract agreements in place with every subcontractor we do business with. These agreements extend the contractual obligations we have with our clients to the subcontractors who are also working on your project.
— Warranty
We will forever offer a 1 year materials and workmanship warranty on our work. This warranty extends to all of our subcontractors through our contract agreements. In some cases, the products we use have warranties that extend beyond one year. Should you choose to have a warranty that extends beyond one year, there are options available and we would be happy to discuss with you.
Peace of Mind
We love providing our wonderful clients the highest level of protection and peace of mind by implementing industry leading best practices on all of our projects. We know that we do things that some builders out there don’t do. It is heartbreaking to us when we hear about the nightmare experiences people have with their builders. Those nightmares can most often be prevented entirely or reduced to small headaches when these best practices are in use. One client of ours who met us after their nightmare experience said it perfectly, “If you think hiring a good contractor is expensive, try hiring a bad one.”
“If you think hiring a good contractor is expensive, try hiring a bad one.”
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