As a global firm, Ware Malcomb has over 28 offices in North America, Central America and recently expanded to South America. While the firm had been primarily focused on industrial, office and healthcare sectors, they’ve been diversifying their project types into market sectors like multi-family housing over the last 10 years.
In order to expand into the multi-family market, Ware Malcomb decided to use site feasibility studies as a part of their marketing efforts to attract developer clients. The team had to spend non-billable hours vetting out sites for clients to help win projects.As the business development efforts grew, the demand for multi-family site planning services increased significantly. They needed to find ways to make the site planning process more efficient.
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Ware Malcomb’s Search to Reduce Non-Billable Hours
To reduce the non-billable hours they spent on site planning, Ware Malcomb originally looked into using Dynamo scripts with Revit to automate some of their plans, but they soon came across TestFit and realized it’s much more powerful than what they had planned. They started doing a few case studies to see if the co-authoring AI platform is the right fit for their team.
Grant would do a site study for one of their clients manually and another person in the team would do the same thing in TestFit. By doing this side by side, they realized that it took them 1/3 of the time to do a site plan in TestFit.
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Reduce Site Planning Time from 3 Days to ½ a Day
Typically, it took the team at least 3 days to develop a site plan. “Now a podium takes only half a day,” says Christina D'Anza. As a result, Ware Malcomb was able to save well over $200,000 in non-billable hours the first year of using TestFit.
This time saved not only allowed the company to be more profitable, but they can also get studies over to clients faster. As a result, they win over more and more clients in multi-family development.
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2D to 3D in Seconds
With TestFit, they can easily see the 3D massing in context while site planning in 2D, which saves the team time sending files back and forth. To create more polished presentations, the team can also export their TestFit files directly into SketchUp or Revit to further develop the site plans and create renderings for their feasibility studies.
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Leveraging Co-authoring to Build Client Relationships
Ware Malcomb is constantly working to create a consistent and unified product for their clients. “Since we have a lot of corporate accounts with developers around the country, our goal is to have them get the same level of service and deliverable from whichever office they’re working with,” says Brandenburg.
To provide the best client experience nationally, they needed a platform that they can trust to study different sites for their clients during their underwriting process. With each site, they use TestFit’s co-authoring ability to review multiple options.
To help their clients decide on which site to proceed with, Ware Malcomb needed to figure out all the calculations such as:
- What is our building footprint?
- How many units does that yeild?
- What is the efficiency factor of a 5 foot vs 6 foot corridor?
- How much amenity space should we have?
“It just took so many manual hours to do all calculations by hand based on prior experience or to be able to explain that to somebody in the team.” But with TestFit, the team can easily understand what is going on for each scheme within each site. This gives them the ability to be a trusted advisor to their clients and win work when a feasible site is finally selected.
Between significantly saving labor hours, visualizing site planning in 3D, and leveraging automation to build trust, in just a short time, TestFit gives Ware Malcomb the competitive edge to win more projects.
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