There’s a structural problem in the construction industry that doesn’t get talked about enough: the incentives of your contractor and the incentives of your project are often pointing in different directions.
A traditional contractor gets paid on volume and margin. The faster they turn projects, the more they make. Change orders are profit centers. Schedule delays that are outside their control are opportunities to recover margin. None of this is malicious. It’s just math.
But for a developer or investor, every one of those dynamics is a risk. You need a contractor who is motivated to protect your budget, not just their own. You need someone whose financial outcome is tied to yours.
We structured Dana Gunnell specifically to address this. On select projects, we invest part or all of our fee, or additional cash, as equity alongside our clients. When it makes sense for the deal and the relationship, we put our own money in. That changes everything about how we show up.
When we have skin in the game, value engineering isn’t a conversation we have reluctantly after the budget blows up. It’s something we’re proactively driving from day one. Subcontractor selection isn’t about who we have the best relationship with. It’s about who delivers the best value for the project. Schedule isn’t just a document we update every Friday. It’s something we’re actively protecting because our return depends on it too.
We came from large institutional organizations where alignment between owner and contractor was always the goal, even if it was rarely achieved. We spent years as developers ourselves, so we know what it feels like to be on the other side of a contractor who is optimizing for themselves. We built our firm to be different.
For developers and investors working on multifamily, build-to-rent, commercial, or industrial projects in Salt Lake City and Utah County, this alignment model is something worth asking your contractor about. If they don’t have a good answer, that tells you something.
We’re always happy to walk through how our co-investment model works and whether it makes sense for your next project.