Commercial Projects & Construction Management

Construction projects fail quietly, then all at once: a scope gap discovered at bid time, a change order in month three, a schedule that slips one trade at a time. Levaru provides construction project management and owner’s representative services for commercial buildings across the DMV, from our headquarters in Alexandria, Virginia. We sit on your side of the table, and only your side, from the first budget line to the last punch item.

That distinction matters more than any other on this page. Architects answer to the design. Contractors answer to the construction contract. Someone has to answer to the owner, full time, in writing. That is the job.

What Does an Owner’s Representative Do?

An owner’s representative manages a construction project on the owner’s behalf: defining scope, setting the budget, running the bid process, supervising the contractor, controlling changes, and closing the project out. The rep has no financial interest in the construction itself, which is exactly what makes the role useful.

In practice, the work is a long list of unglamorous decisions made early enough to be cheap. Writing a scope document tight enough that three contractors price the same project. Flagging the lead-time item that will blow the schedule if it is not ordered in week two. Reading a pay application against actual progress on the wall, not against the schedule of values on paper. Refusing a change order until the contractor shows the math.

An owner’s representative is the one party on a construction project whose only financial interest is the owner’s outcome. Everyone else at the table is paid by the project. The rep is paid to protect the person funding it.

Owners hire us for this role in two situations: projects large enough that a full-time internal manager would make sense but does not exist, and portfolios where projects arrive irregularly and building an internal team would sit idle between them. Either way, the deliverables are the same: a controlled budget, a defended schedule, and a documented record of every decision.

Our Project Service Lines

Projects at Levaru is one discipline applied at different scales. Six service lines, one method.

Project Management

End-to-end owner-side management: program definition, budget development, design team coordination, permitting strategy, bidding, construction oversight, and closeout. You get a single accountable manager and a weekly written report that says what happened, what it cost, and what needs a decision. Read more on our project management page.

Construction Management

Deeper field involvement for active construction: site walks, quality checks against the drawings, RFI and submittal tracking, schedule pressure applied trade by trade, and pay application review before your money moves. We verify work in place before anyone gets paid for it. Read more on our construction management page.

Tenant Improvements

Buildouts and renovations of leased commercial space, from test fit through punch list, including TI allowance management and landlord coordination. This is its own discipline with its own page: tenant improvement construction.

Capital Planning

A multi-year forecast of what your building will need and roughly when: roof replacement, chiller end-of-life, elevator modernization, parking deck repairs. A capital plan turns surprise six-figure emergencies into budgeted line items your lender and your board have already seen. Read more on our capital planning page.

Move Management

Relocations planned as projects, because they are: vendor selection, sequencing, IT and furniture coordination, building rules at both ends, and a move weekend that ends with people working on Monday. Read more on our move management page.

Space Planning

Test fits, program development, and furniture planning before you commit to a lease or a buildout. An hour of space planning before the lease is signed is worth more than a month of redesign after. Read more on our space planning page.

How We Run Construction Project Management

Every project runs through the same owner-side controls. None of them are exotic. All of them get skipped on troubled projects.

Scope development

The scope document is the project. We write it before design is finished and keep it current: what is included, what is excluded, what is owner-furnished, which allowances exist and what they assume. Most change orders are born in scope gaps; the cheapest change-order control is a scope with no gaps to exploit.

Budgeting

The budget carries every cost, not just construction: design fees, permits, utility fees, furniture, technology, moving, and a contingency sized to the real risk of the job. A budget that omits soft costs is not conservative, it is fiction with a spreadsheet format.

Bid leveling

We pre-qualify bidders, issue identical documents, answer questions in written addenda so every bidder prices the same information, then level the bids line by line. Exclusions get chased down in writing before award, not discovered in month two as change orders.

Schedule management

The schedule is a working tool, not a wall decoration. We track long-lead procurement from day one, hold the contractor to two-week look-aheads, and flag slippage the week it happens. Schedules are lost in days, one trade at a time, and recovered only at overtime rates.

Change-order control

Every proposed change gets the same treatment: is it truly out of scope, is the pricing supported by labor and material backup, and what does it do to the schedule? Legitimate changes get processed fast, with your written approval. Padding gets sent back with questions attached.

Punch and closeout

We run the punch walk room by room and hold retainage until the list is done, not mostly done. Closeout means you receive warranties, as-builts, O&M manuals, and lien releases before final payment, because chasing paperwork from a demobilized contractor is a hobby nobody enjoys.

Rule of thumb: the cheapest day to change a construction project is the day before the drawings are finished. Every day after that, the same decision costs more and buys less.

Capital Planning That Starts From Maintenance Data

Most capital plans are built from a walkthrough and a spreadsheet of guesses. Ours start from data, because for buildings we operate, the data already exists.

Every building on our facility program runs on Levaru’s own platform: QR-coded asset tags, photo-documented work orders, and a preventive maintenance history for every serviceable asset. That record tells you which rooftop unit is quietly consuming repair dollars, which boiler is past the point where maintenance is buying time, and which systems are aging gracefully and can wait.

A capital plan built from that history replaces “the chiller is old” with “this chiller has absorbed four compressor-circuit repairs in recent seasons and should be programmed for replacement, at this budget, in this fiscal year.” The difference is the difference between asking a board for money and showing them why the money is already committed.

The connection runs both ways. Project decisions feed back into the maintenance program: a new unit gets tagged, scheduled, and documented on day one, so its warranty period is actually used instead of discovered after it expires.

360° Documentation, Before, During, and After

Construction disputes are usually memory disputes. What did the space look like before demolition? Was the conduit installed before the wall closed? What is actually above that ceiling grid?

We answer those questions with a camera instead of a recollection. Project sites are captured with 360° photo documentation at three points: existing conditions before work starts, in-wall and above-ceiling conditions during construction before they are covered, and finished conditions at closeout. Walkable floor-level captures are tied to the floor plan, viewable in a browser by you and anyone you invite.

The before-capture protects you in an occupied building, where pre-existing damage claims otherwise become negotiations. The during-capture is the one owners thank us for years later, when a renovation or a leak investigation needs to know exactly what is inside a wall without opening it. The after-capture becomes the as-built record your next project starts from.

How Construction Project Management Fees Are Structured

Owner-side management fees follow three common structures, and we will tell you plainly which fits your project.

Percentage of construction cost. The market-typical structure for full-service management of a defined project. The percentage scales down as project value goes up, because the work does not double when the budget does. Its weakness is the optics: the fee rises with cost, so we pair it with a fixed scope so the incentive stays clean.

Fixed fee. A set price for a defined scope and duration. Best when the project is well defined, and the structure owners tend to prefer because the number is the number. Schedule extensions beyond an agreed window are handled by a pre-agreed monthly rate rather than renegotiation.

Hourly. For early-stage work, feasibility questions, small projects, or troubled projects where the remaining effort is genuinely unknowable. Capped at an agreed not-to-exceed figure so hourly never means open-ended.

What drives the number in every structure: project complexity, duration, occupancy during construction, the number of jurisdictions and permits involved, and how much design-phase management is needed. What should never drive it: change orders. Our fee is never a percentage of changes, because a manager paid on change orders has a conflict you do not want on your project.

One Firm From Project to Operations

Most project managers hand you keys and disappear. Because Levaru also operates buildings, our projects close out into an operating plan: assets tagged, preventive schedules loaded, documentation filed where the maintenance team and the owner can both see it. If we manage the building afterward, the transition is a handoff to ourselves. If we do not, you still receive a documented building instead of a box of binders.

Have a project on the horizon in Alexandria, Arlington, Washington DC, Bethesda, Baltimore, or anywhere in between? Request a proposal and we will scope it with you before anyone draws a line.