You’ve chosen the building that you want to renovate and sell at a profit and you’ve gone through the building and decided exactly what you want to change and what can be left as is. What’s next? Now is the time to decide if you are going to be supervisor and coordinator of all these home improvements or if you’re going to hire a project manager to do it. The advantage of doing it yourself is that you save the money that you’d pay for the project manager. The advantage of having a professional project manager take on the job is that he has the experience and contacts that you don’t have, and that if he’s regularly on site supervising the workers, this frees your time to be involved in other projects.
Like most things in life, it’s very important to get everything in writing. Regarding verbal agreements, there are often misunderstandings. If you decide to hire a project manager, you should sign a Joint Contract Tribunal (JCT) contract with them. If you decide to do the managing yourself, be sure to get all the estimates in writing for how much the materials will cost (taps, tiles, carpeting, light fixtures, countertops and sinks, baths, under-floor heating, etc), as well as how much the labour will cost. Make sure that whomever you’re working with comes highly recommended. Unexpected expenses do come up, so you should allot an extra 15% for them, but having the project cost twice as much as you planned usually means that not enough research was put in at the beginning of the project to ascertain if it was worth taking on in the first place.