Looking Toward the Future
“The success of design/build is breeding our next round of competitors,” Klein says. He believes those competitors will be the “smaller guys who heretofore have said, ‘We’re just contractors.’ But he’s waking up to the fact that he needs to be able to say, ‘Sure, I can help you design your kitchen.’ Or, ‘Go to Home Depot; they’ll help you and then bring it back to me.’ All sorts of ways to get there. And even in our upper-middle and middle-class design/build market, we’re breeding competitors of link-ups between architects.”
The way to continue to be able to compete with these people and to further the success of design/build will be to differentiate themselves, Klein says. “Pay as much attention to the construction process as we’re paying to the design process,” in order to cut down on the overall time between start and finish. Second, “look at the cost factor that by controlling design we can truly have an impact on cost in a way that we could measure it and communicate it.”
What will also play a role in determining the evolution of design/build is the impact of the Internet and the big box stores.
The Internet has “made it easier,” says Cosentini, who uses e-mail on a regular basis to communicate with her clients, mostly Cornell University professors. “If I have a suggestion, I can just send [clients] to a Web site instead of doing the whole come down to the office, look through the catalog, send the catalog, and so on.”
Swartz recognizes that the Internet can be beneficial for searching for products, because many manufacturers will give the retail price. “Plumbing would be a good example,” he says. But he believes the process works best if the remodeler controls it, “rather than sending [clients] to faucets.com.”
The Internet has also made clients more educated about products, and sometimes they come to the remodeler with suggestions on better ways to build. That’s when Klein allies himself with the clients and lets them know that if they do the research, he’s open to suggestions. “If it’s a good idea, we’ll do it,” he says. It’s a way of joining with the customer and not being defensive. “You’ve got to dispel the power of the Internet.”
The big box issue is significant, but it can go two ways. On the one hand, the group agreed that often they can’t touch the price of The Home Depot or Lowe’s, but at the same time, the stores aren’t necessarily taking away their clients. Says Kelly, “They’ve potentially taken some pieces of the market away, but I don’t think any of us have felt huge pain over their presence.”
As a bonus, Cosentini points out, “Their incompetence is probably going to generate work.” Plus, the level of design sophistication of a clerk at a big box retailer might never compare.
Yet it’s not just design that sets the design/builders apart. “It’s the overall process, including the build part of the cycle,” Klein says. When the big retailers “see how intensive that is and how costly it is from the contractor’s perspective to really handle the client properly, they turn and run the other way.”