Frequently Asked Questions?
GBT is uniquely qualified because of its vast experience and great value. We have inspected over 100,000,000 square feet of space and over 41,350 unique spaces. Together with our experience, process and price, we bring the job in on time and on budget and help all the parties to be more efficient in the process thus saving all parties time and or money.
Only a few years ago a project of this size would have been inspected or punched with yellow legal pads and a digital camera. After a long days work, all that information then would have been translated into a spreadsheet and the pictures married up with the punch item and then categorized by Sub-Contractor or by floor or GC depending on the project. On a project of this size and scope you are literally saving tens of thousands of high dollar manpower to inspect, assign, organize, report and close these items.
Our service is the same whether we are engaged by the Owner, GC or the Architect. Our team has proprietary processes that make our inspections more efficient. From the tools we use to the team we have to the processes and communications involved. However, the biggest difference is the cost to be honest.
The short answer is a fraction of the costs of an Architect doing inspections / observations under Construction Administration. We are typically 25-50% lower than the price of inspections / observations under AOR CA depending on the market place. We will typically charge you time and Materials with a not to exceed value. Sadly a lot of projects are slowed or stalled due to various reasons which impacts our efficiency significantly. You cost savings are really a byproduct of us being more efficient.
Yes of course. Most of our customers are Owners wanting an independent arbiter between all other parties but we do have a lot of Architectural firms that hire us to represent them under Construction Administration contracts for both Field Observations and Final inspections / observations. A lot of times our costs are so significantly lower, an Architect will often hire us and still make considerable profit themselves. We are an extension to their team.
Part of our great efficiency is that we utilize FinishLine software exclusively. It does connect to a lot of the major CPM software’s such as Procore, so our inspections / observation goes into the other platform. Our team can utilize any inspections / observation software however, the costs are going to be higher. As an example, we utilized the owners CPM software on a project and each inspection / observation item had an average of 11 additional fields of data to fill out. In addition, there were challenges using it on their Wi-Fi infrastructure causing at least a 1 to 2 minute delay in syncing inspection / observation items. With over 200,000 inspection / observation items, the hours on this project were almost 30% higher than a typical project.
Although we don’t have teams in some smaller cities in the world we do cover most of the major ones…even internationally. We are a Global Service Provider with exception to a small group of countries where it’s hard to get Visa’s. In the event we do not have a ground crew ready to go, we will send our seasoned veterans there for a period of time to get a local team trained up.
Most GCs save time using our services and in some cases, saved time equals saved money. Where we really help is in coordinating the Subs in the platform from assignment through to completion. Believe it or not, a lot of big name GCs still use paper or punch cards to complete work. Our unique process marries technology and old school methods to accomplish the same thing, often times with near real-time communications. Even if you are already using Procore, we can send our inspection / observation information directly to the Procore application.
Typically none, unless specifically requested by a customer. This is how we offer great savings to you. Our team consists of seasoned or veteran inspectors that have done this for a living. Some are professionally licensed but most are not. We perform field inspections as observations unless otherwise requested. Thus keeping the cost or our team down and the savings is passed on to you. Most Architects performing inspections or field observations do not have licensed personnel either so it’s really no different.
Not all as our competition will copy that lol. However imagine our team is inspecting / observing a room and you want the subs to be right on our heals to mitigate the work asap. When we are done inspecting a room we sync the data to the cloud allowing real-time access for any party typically on the platform and we also generate a “Door report” from a nearby Wi-Fi printer that shows the plan, pictures and descriptions of deficiencies to all subs with items on that room. A sub merely completes the work and initials the hard copy that the work was done OR completes it real-time in the platform with a picture of the completed work.
In a typical engagement by an Owner or Owners rep we would perform construction inspections / observations, lock out the rooms until FFE is loaded in and then perform an FFE inspection / observation as well. In some higher end hotels we have done IT or Technology testing as well to ensure the guest experience is the best it can be with technology. In an engagement with an Architect we typically do Field Observations as well and a Construction or Architectural inspection / observation. On a typical GC engagement, usually only the GC inspections / observations.