Commercial Manager (Pre-Construction)

What you'll be doing?

The Commercial team deals with everything to do with cost-effective building, including quantity surveying, estimating, procurement and material buying.

With a watching brief on choice of material, cost, customer satisfaction and sales, and other critical issues, our Commercial team – which comprises Estimators, Quantity Surveyors and Material Buyers - has one objective: to deliver best quality homes, at the best possible cost. Their work is fundamental to our continued viability as a business and presents a fast-moving challenge that will exercise your creativity and commercial flair to the full.

Reporting to the Commercial Director, you will effectively manage a team of surveyors, taking overall responsibility of a number of developments, including regeneration schemes and projects that have multiple phases. Effectively manage costs, and ensure targets are met by managing and controlling the budget and valuations, including monthly updating of the estimated final costs, and have the ability to show absolute cost and value reconciliation. Overall responsibility for all sub-contractor procedures and processes, and materials and goods if necessary, whilst always ensuring compliance with Group Policies and Procedures. Engage and mentor a team of all abilities. Actively involved in value engineering to ensure that we are always one step ahead of the market.

You Will Be Expected To

• Management/oversee of front-end commercial operations including bidding, land purchase, cost planning, design control, budget management, supply chain management/engagement, procurement strategy, and support of procurement activities to point of contract
• Drive standardisation and consistency of all front-end activities that support and enhance commercial teams in procurement and ultimately securing smoother delivery
• Enhance collaboration with relevant departments including planning, buying, procurement, commercial and design management teams
• Ability to support all stages of pre-contract design (typically RIBA 0-3) with the aim of optimising design efficiency and procurement activities with the goal of optimal commercial success
• Support in the careful consideration of the golden thread and BSA gateway strategy for each project and tying this back to the project procurement strategy, identifying the correct supply chain that can truly deliver the requirements
• Identification and pricing of project specific risks and opportunities from outset; preparation of mitigation strategies and contingency advice to inform commercial appraisal
• Strategic management of supply chain - early engagement to drive greater cost certainty and up to date rates, tracking of supply chain exposure and management of relationships
• Tracking and analysis of inflation indices to allow informed forecasts to be developed and held in cost plans
• Early engagement of supply chain where unfamiliar risks are identified, and no in-house expertise exist
• Benchmarking of cost data and design metrics across all projects to support cost planning and provide context to board of current schemes in pre-contract stages
• Explore London specific cross regional standardisation and sharing of cost data, benchmarking, and design metrics to provide greater understanding of the wider market and what ‘excellent’ looks like. This would involve working with West & East London regions to collaborate and share to benefit the wider business
• Collation of final account data to understand historic risk expenditure and feeding this back to front end cost planning activities
• Analysis of abnormal costs to provide context of site specifics and understanding of what is driving build cost rate differentiations across current schemes
• Upskill cost planning teams on presentation tools and cost plan templates to drive consistency and clearer understanding across the business of build cost data, risks, opportunities, design metrics and benchmarking