There is a question I find myself coming back to more and more often in this industry: why does it take so long to get these projects done? Not the construction, that part actually moves at a reasonable pace once it gets going. I'm talking about everything that comes before it. The solicitations, the competitive procurements, the months of proposal writing, the fee negotiations, the back and forth over contract terms that ultimately account for a fraction of the overall project cost. By the time a team is actually selected and a contract is signed, years can pass, and everyone involved, the client, the development team, the community waiting for the project, has spent an extraordinary amount of time and resources just to get to a starting line.

I understand why the system works this way. Public institutions have an obligation to be responsible stewards of taxpayer dollars, and competitive procurement is one way to demonstrate that responsibility. I'm not suggesting we abandon accountability or transparency. What I am suggesting is that there's a growing disconnect between what the current procurement model is designed to achieve and what it actually produces in practice, and I think more and more people on both sides of the table are starting to feel it.

The Real Cost of the Current Model

When we competed for the Howard County Courthouse project, nine teams submitted qualifications. Three were shortlisted. The two teams that didn't win were each reimbursed $750,000 just for participating in the final round of the procurement, because the cost of putting together a competitive proposal at that level is enormous. 

That's $1.5 million paid to the teams that lost, and it doesn't account for what the winning team spent, what the county spent to manage the process, or what all nine original teams invested at the qualification stage. That's a lot of resources directed at selecting a partner, and it raises a question worth asking: is this really the most effective way to find the right team for a project?

The part that I keep coming back to is that after all of that effort, after years of procurement and negotiation, the actual fees that development teams are competing over typically represent somewhere between three and five percent of the total project cost. The other ninety-five percent, the construction, the financing, the operations, is where the outcome of the project is actually determined, and none of that gets better through competitive pressure on fees. It gets better through a strong partnership. And yet the current model is built around the assumption that grinding down that three to five percent is the best use of everyone's time and money. To me, that math has never made sense.

What Gets Lost Along the Way

Beyond the financial cost, there's something more subtle that gets lost in lengthy competitive procurements. When the process is structured around competition, the natural dynamic between client and developer is one of distance. Everyone is measured and careful, which is understandable given the stakes, but it means that the period when the most consequential decisions about a project are being considered and shaped is also the period when the people involved have the least amount of trust and openness with each other. That's a hard environment to do your best thinking in, for anyone.

There's a widely held belief that clients lose their leverage if they select a partner early and defer some of the detailed negotiations until later. I've never found that to be the case. The leverage doesn't disappear when you choose a partner. It evolves into something that I think is actually more effective: shared accountability. When both sides know that the success of the project depends on the strength of the partnership, and that neither one can afford for it to fail, the conversations become more honest, more creative, and more productive than anything I've seen come out of a competitive procurement.

A Different Model Is Emerging

What gives me a lot of optimism is that I can see this starting to change. More clients are moving toward models where they select a development partner earlier in the process, based on qualifications, trust, and alignment, and then work collaboratively through the detailed decisions around price, schedule, and scope. The competitive element doesn't go away entirely, but it moves to a place in the process where it can be productive rather than adversarial.

I think this shift is also being accelerated by a generational reality that doesn't get talked about enough. Many of the experienced facilities leaders and capital planning professionals at public institutions, the people who really understood how to manage complex projects from the inside, are retiring. The institutional knowledge they carried is not easily replaced, and that means the institutions they leave behind need something different from their development partners than they did a decade ago. They need partners who can help fill that gap, who can think strategically alongside them, and who will be there not just to deliver a project but to help steward it over time.

Where I Think We're Headed

In the innovation space where I spend a lot of my time, I've already seen this shift starting to take shape. When a development partner has spent years learning an institution, building relationships with its people, and cultivating an ecosystem that depends on deep knowledge and trust, it becomes very difficult to replicate that through a new competitive procurement. If the partnership is working and the results are there, both sides have every reason to continue building on what they've created together. And if it's not working, that becomes evident quickly enough. But the point is that the model rewards performance and long-term commitment rather than the ability to win a proposal.

Life's too short, and these projects are too important, to spend years fighting through a process that makes the work harder than it needs to be. Pick a partner you trust, and figure the rest out together. That's how the best projects we've ever been part of have started, and I don't think that's a coincidence.