One Bangkok: Smart city at scale
250,000+ IoT sensors across the district
Owner's representative services.
An owner's representative is the owner's own project lead: independent of the designers and the contractor, holding scope, cost, schedule and quality on the owner's behalf. In the UK it's called client-side project management. ddx is the owner's representative on hotels, mixed-use districts and smart buildings, from governance and design to procurement and handover.
For owners and developers of hotels, mixed-use districts and smart buildings.
What we cover
One owner-side team across the whole project. More on what an owner’s representative does.
- Governance. A project management framework aligned with PMI (the Project Management Institute) across scope, risk, procurement and delivery: the discipline of our PMO consultancy, on the owner’s side.
- Design management. Guarding the design intent as the drawings develop and the costs come in.
- Cost control and schedule oversight. Real-time visibility of cost, programme and stakeholder performance.
- Change control and scope verification. Formal processes, so decisions at every stage are evidence-based and aligned with the owner’s budget and objectives.
- Procurement and vendors. Technical evaluation and procurement of specialist vendors on the owner’s behalf, then coordination of the work packages they’re awarded.
- Building systems. The technology a building or district runs on, from strategy to integration: see smart building consultancy.
- Handover and operations. An operating model and a handover plan, so the owner’s team can run what’s built from day one.
Owner-controlled planning
The contractor’s programme says what the contractor will do. The owner needs a plan of their own.
On Marriott’s Tokyo flagship, the plan has two layers: the contractor’s schedule, integrated with an owner-controlled platform that shows cost, programme and stakeholder performance in real time.
That’s the record ddx PMO is built to keep: one live project record, documents and drawings in a common data environment (one place where every revision is controlled), and transmittals to suppliers.
Hotels, districts and buildings
We act for owners on three kinds of project.
Hotels. On a live hotel, the owner’s representative works around guests and operations as well as the contractor. For Marriott International, ddx provides embedded Design and PMO Director services on the renovation of a flagship hotel in Tokyo. More on hotel renovations.
Mixed-use districts. One Bangkok is 1.8 million square metres of offices, retail, hotels, homes and culture. ddx ran the smart services PMO there for Hitachi Asia, 22 work packages and about 120 people, then took on systems integration and programme governance for the developer’s smart services company through to opening in October 2024.
Smart buildings. At One Bangkok, more than 30 systems run on one vendor-neutral platform. The owner’s representative decides how they connect before anyone is hired to supply them.
Where we work
ddx has offices in London, Tokyo, Hong Kong, Bangkok and Dubai.
Owner’s representative services are part of our urban development work, alongside the systems that make a district run as one.
How owner's representatives are paid.
Usually in one of three ways. Which one fits depends on how well the scope is known at the start, and how long the programme runs.
Fixed fee
One price for a defined scope. Clear from the start, and suited to a scope that won't move much.
Monthly
A fee for each month the team is in place. Suited to long programmes, where the work changes as it goes.
Percentage
A share of the project's construction cost. The fee follows the size of the project rather than the time spent.
Questions.
- Is an owner's representative a project manager?
- Yes, on the owner's side. A project manager can work for anyone on a project, the contractor included; an owner's representative works only for the owner and answers only to them.
- What's the difference between an owner's representative and a construction manager?
- A construction manager is appointed to build the project, or to manage its building. An owner's representative builds nothing: it checks cost, schedule and quality across every consultant and contractor, the construction manager included, on the owner's behalf.
- Why hire an owner's representative?
- To have one person on the owner's side who sees the whole project: design, cost, schedule, contracts and handover. It matters most on a first project, on a live asset such as a hotel, and where there are many consultants and contractors.
Who to talk to.
Pawel Michalski
Co-founder and Partner
Leads real estate at ddx: development management, design and delivery for Marriott, Kasumigaseki Capital and One Bangkok. An architect with 25 years in hospitality and commercial projects, formerly Worldwide Head of Design for Amazon’s operations real estate and Executive Director of AvroKO’s Asia studio.
Start a conversation.
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