On a CM-at-risk building, design development is when a contractor’s preconstruction team shows its habits. Count the allowances against the schematic estimate, check whether reconciliation runs system by system, and note who attends. Allowances that multiply while the drawings firm up are decisions nobody made, and they return at closeout as change orders.

Picture the second design development meeting on a negotiated building. The contractor’s estimate summary is on the screen. The curtain wall is drawn down to the anchor clips, and the line beside it still reads “allowance.” The architect drew that detail; the contractor preconstruction team has not priced it. One allowance is housekeeping. A list that has grown since schematic design is a pattern, and that pattern tends to decide how the job closes out.

What does a contractor preconstruction team show the architect at design development?

A contractor preconstruction team shows, at design development, how it handles what it does not yet know. From the architect’s chair four things are legible: the allowance count, how the estimate reconciles with the design team’s, what value engineering proposes, and who turns up to defend the numbers.

The delivery method sets the stage. Under construction manager at risk, the builder joins while the design is still moving and prices it at agreed milestones before committing to a guaranteed maximum price. GSA’s rules for its own version, construction manager as constructor, spell out the design-phase services: scheduling, systems analysis, subcontractor involvement, cost estimating, constructability reviews, cost reconciliation and market analysis (GSAM part 536). A private university research building in Texas or a hospital bed tower in Nashville runs on the same logic with less paperwork.

Architects sit in an unusual seat to read all of that. The Bureau of Labor Statistics describes architects as giving preliminary estimates on cost and construction time, and notes that they may help clients get construction bids, select contractors and negotiate construction contracts (architect duties). It is a small profession: 106,770 architects were employed in the United States in May 2025 (BLS architect data). The same principals meet the same builders across projects, and owners often ask them who to invite next time.

There is plenty of work to watch. Private nonresidential construction ran at a seasonally adjusted annual pace of $773.0 billion in August 2026, and public educational construction at $113.1 billion (construction spending). Of the four signals, the allowance count is the easiest to follow, because it moves.

How do allowances creep from schematic design into the GMP?

One defensible line at a time. At schematic design, an allowance for an undrawn system is reasonable. At design development, that line should turn into priced scope. When it stays an allowance and new ones join it, the list drifts into the GMP exhibit without anyone deciding that it should.

Each allowance marks a decision that came due and was not made: the light fixture package waiting on the user group, the casework waiting on equipment selections, the curtain wall waiting on a mock-up. On the estimate summary it reads as commercial prudence, which is exactly why nobody objects to the fifth one, or the fifteenth. The water warms a degree at each meeting, and by the GMP the owner is sitting in it.

Public owners write down how fast undefined money should shrink. The Department of Veterans Affairs, through its cost estimating office, sets probable design contingency ranges for its design firms: 20 to 25 percent at the project book, 15 to 20 percent at concept design, 10 to 15 percent at schematic design, 7.5 to 10 percent at design development and 2.5 to 5 percent at construction documents, reaching 0 percent at the final estimate (VA estimating requirements).

That contingency belongs to the design team’s estimator, not to a contractor’s allowance schedule. It is still the clearest published yardstick for how much unpriced scope a public owner expects to survive each stage, and the same document is blunt about detail: lump sum or allowance figures are not acceptable for detailed elements. If an element is shown, it must be priced. If it is shown in detail, it must be priced in detail.

VA design contingency, upper end by design phase Bar chart, VA design contingency, upper end by design phase: Project book 25%, Concept design 20%, Schematic design 15%, Design development 10%, Construction documents 5%. VA design contingency, upper end by design phase The VA expects the money held for undefined design to shrink at every phase and reach zero at thefinal estimate. 0% 12% 25% 38% 50% Project book 25% Concept design 20% Schematic design 15% Design development 10% Construction documents 5% Source: VA Cost Estimating Requirements, August 2022
The VA expects the money held for undefined design to shrink at every phase and reach zero at the final estimate.

A contractor’s allowance list that grows between the schematic and design development estimates is running against that slope. GSA’s cost guidance for reimbursable projects makes the same point about accuracy: an estimate built from design development drawings, usually 25 to 40 percent complete, carries plus or minus 20 percent, against plus 10 and minus 5 percent once drawings and specifications are complete (GSA cost guidance). The allowance count says how much is unpriced. The reconciliation says whether anyone is trying to price it.

Which design development signals predict trouble at closeout?

Six signals carry the weight. They are a longer allowance list than at schematic design, reconciliation by bottom line rather than by system, value engineering that deletes scope, late constructability comments, no trade pricing on the big packages, and a new preconstruction lead at each meeting.

Signal at design developmentWhat it tends to mean at closeout
Allowance list longer than at schematic designAllowance overruns settled by change order
Reconciliation to the bottom line only”Not in the GMP” arguments during buyout
Value engineering as a list of deletionsRedesign in construction documents and lost float
Constructability comments after the set is issuedRFIs and design-change requests in the field
No trade pricing on MEP or the envelopeBuyout gaps on the largest packages
A different preconstruction lead at each meetingGMP assumptions nobody on site can explain

Reconciliation is the most telling of the six. NIST’s UNIFORMAT II classification sorts a building into elements such as substructure, shell, interiors and services, each performing a function regardless of the specification, which keeps estimates comparable from project to project. The VA asks for Uniformat II Level 4 at design development. A team that reconciles with the design team’s estimate system by system can show where a gap sits. A team that reconciles only to the total has already decided where the gap goes: into an allowance.

Value engineering has a federal definition worth borrowing. FAR 48.101 says it attempts to eliminate, without impairing essential functions or characteristics, anything that increases acquisition, operation or support costs. A list that deletes the sunshades and downgrades the air handlers fails that test: it cuts scope, and the design team redraws the cut in construction documents. GSA’s own CMc rules switch FAR Part 48 value engineering off for that delivery method, yet the definition is still the right test.

Constructability comments are cheapest while the drawings can still move. A preconstruction team that sends them after the design development set is issued is reviewing, not contributing. NIOSH makes the parallel case for worker safety in its Prevention through Design toolkit for the construction industry: a hazard is easiest to design out early in a project’s life.

Four documents turn these signals into something an architect can ask for before the next meeting:

  • the allowance schedule, with each line’s amount, the decision it is waiting on and the date that decision is needed
  • the reconciliation against the design team’s estimate, by Uniformat II system
  • the source of trade pricing on the three largest packages
  • the name of the person who will write the GMP exhibit’s assumptions and clarifications

Later, those four become one document. It is the one that gets signed.

What does the GMP exhibit reveal about a preconstruction team?

The GMP exhibit turns design development habits into the price. Its allowance schedule, assumptions and clarifications state what the contractor will build for the number and what it will not. In most GMP agreements, an allowance that runs over is settled by change order, so the owner carries it.

Until this point every allowance was a line in a working estimate, open to a friendly question across the table. In the exhibit it becomes a term the owner signs, and friendly questions stop being cheap.

Federal rules show how seriously an owner can treat that. GSA builds a CMc GMP from the estimated cost of the work, a contingency allowance for costs such as the contractor’s own estimating, scheduling and planning errors, and the contractor’s profit and home office overhead, and it defines the GMP as the ceiling price described in FAR 16.403-2. That contingency allowance may not exceed 3 percent of the estimated cost of the work without written approval, and any separate allowance on top of it needs a written determination approved by the contracting director. The final estimated cost of the work is set, generally, no earlier than 75 percent construction documents.

A private CM-at-risk agreement carries no such rule. On many private jobs the architect is the only professional outside the owner’s own team who reads the exhibit line by line before it is signed, and the allowance schedule is the page to read first.

At closeout every allowance is reconciled against what was spent. One that ran over moves the price. One that covered a detail the design development set already showed becomes an argument about what the drawings said and when, and the architect’s own set is the reference point in that argument.

The exhibit also has an author. Whether the architect has ever met that author is the last signal.

Why does it matter who attends the design development meetings?

The person who priced the schematic estimate knows which allowances were placeholders and which were real gaps. When the preconstruction lead changes between schematic design and design development, that memory leaves with them, and the GMP exhibit gets written by someone reading the estimate cold.

Preconstruction people are stretched thin. Employment in construction of buildings reached 1,873.4 thousand in September 2026, up from 1,846.4 thousand a year earlier (industry employment), and seasonally adjusted construction job openings stood at 251 thousand in August 2026 against 213 thousand in August 2025 (JOLTS data). The estimating bench behind those numbers is small: 224,220 cost estimators were employed nationally in May 2025 (cost estimators). A contractor pursuing several negotiated jobs at once spreads its best people across them.

Turnover in the seat costs the contractor more than it shows (turnover cost), but the architect sees only the symptom: a new face at the table asking for the story behind the schematic numbers. Selah Talent Partners treats a preconstruction seat that changes hands in the middle of design as confidential executive search for mandates that cannot be publicly posted, because a contractor cannot advertise that seat while an owner and an architect are reading its estimate. A preconstruction manager who stays from the first estimate to the GMP is worth more to the job than a stronger one who arrives halfway through design development.

For the architect, a new face reading the estimate cold is a signal in its own right, whatever the reason behind it.

When does this reading not apply?

It does not apply where the contractor is absent from design, as on hard-bid design-bid-build work. It reads differently on design-build, where the architect usually works for the builder, and on fast-track jobs with a deliberately early GMP, where allowances are the agreed tool.

On design-build the contractor carries design risk and the architect is its consultant, so the same signals become an internal matter; the contractor’s design manager is the one reading them. On a fast-track job, count matters less than discipline: each allowance should name the decision it waits on and the date that decision is due. Small tenant fit-outs rarely carry enough allowances for the pattern to mean much.

The argument against allowances also has a limit. Removing them means forcing design decisions earlier, which costs design hours and sometimes schedule, and an owner has to want that. Whether the discipline is worth its cost on a given building is genuinely unsettled. What is not in doubt is that an allowance nobody tracks tends to come back as a change order.

The detail that was drawn and not priced

Go back to the curtain wall line on the screen at the second design development meeting. At that meeting it costs a question: who will price it, from which subcontractor, and by what date. In the GMP exhibit it costs a clarification. At closeout it costs a change order and a conversation about whose drawings showed what.

Architects remember which builders priced what was drawn, and owners ask them. Preconstruction habits are worth reading closely at design development, and worth raising while they are still habits rather than prices.

After award, the contractor’s construction manager carries the exhibit to closeout, and the GMP hire sets out what that seat owns.

When you see an allowance against a detail you drew at design development, you are looking at a change order at closeout.

Sources and further reading