An Auckland commercial body corporate responsible for a block of ten tenanted commercial and industrial units. The body corporate answered to ten separate owners, and every one of them needed to see exactly what they were paying for and why.
The problem
The units needed their roofs replaced. The old sheets were redundant and the whole block had to be brought back to weathertight. The catch was that the work sat directly over live offices, with tenants trading below and a busy car park in constant use. Replacing roofs on tenanted commercial units without shutting the businesses down is a different job to working on an empty site, and it carries real health and safety weight when there are people underneath.
On top of that, a body corporate cannot simply hand each owner a single lump sum. Every owner or landlord had to be charged fairly for their own unit, which meant the cost had to be broken down unit by unit, not smeared across the block.
The approach
CDM took the job end to end as the single accountable party, holding both the cost side and the build.
On cost, CDM priced the work open-book and broke the total into a per-unit breakdown, so each owner or landlord could see their own share and pay it. There was no single opaque number for the committee to defend to its members. Everyone could see where their money went. That costing discipline comes from our quantity surveying work.
On the build, CDM erected a full engineered shrink-wrap and scaffolding structure over the block so the roofs could come off while the offices below kept trading. The air conditioning was removed and later reinstated. The old redundant roofing sheets were stripped, the gutters repaired, a new roof installed, and exterior painting carried out, before everything was reinstated and the block made watertight.
The management around the build was as important as the build itself. CDM planned the work to keep noise over the offices manageable, kept the health and safety of working above occupied premises front of mind, and kept the car park and the tenancies operating throughout. Because one party held the whole job through our commercial project management, there was no gap between the people pricing it, the people managing it and the people doing the work.
The result
The re-roof finished on time and on budget. All ten tenants kept trading right through the works, the car park stayed in use, and each owner received a clear per-unit cost for their share rather than a single figure they could not interrogate. The body corporate dealt with one accountable party from pricing through to a watertight finish.
Managing a body corporate or commercial building upgrade in Auckland? See our maintenance services and construction services, or get in touch with CDM.