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.
We’ve been looking to get more involved in multi-family to diversify our project types, and we’ve found TestFit to be a great help. It helps us lessen the amount of hours on marketing opportunities to win projects when we’re not getting paid for that work up front.
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.
The volume of sites that we’re vetting for clients these days would be a much bigger sunken cost, whereas now we can do this at very little cost to ourselves because it only takes 1/3 of the time to do a site plan in TestFit.
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.
We made a goal to seek out more multi-family work, and TestFit has allowed us to win over developer partners while saving over $200k in labor hours. We can easily provide our clients with quick studies as they vet out sites to see if the sites are the right fit for them based on the data we can find in TestFit like cost of yield, number of units, square footage and more
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.
My favorite part about TestFit is speed and the 3D aspect of it. It’s helpful to be able to see the 3D massing in context while we’re designing the site plan. We then export the TestFit files directly into SketchUp or Revit to further develop the site plans and create renderings for presentations.
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.
TestFit is on the leading edge of utilizing AI to test out site options so we can get to the right solution faster. Being able to have that generative design process to eliminate labor hours and leveraging software to help get us to the best solution for our clients faster is amazing.
