Problem: You are modeling the acquisition or development of a property that benefits from a real estate tax abatement, and want to make sure that you are reflecting the eventual phase-in properly.
REFM 60-Second Skills Solution: Set up a simple table with the tax abatement percentage for each year, and then run a VLOOKUP to reference the [...]

LEED for Homes categories begin with the Innovation and Design Process, examining integrated project planning, building orientation options, durability thinking and unique regional design issues. Like in all, there are prerequisites that without satisfying, no points can be earned in the rest of the category. Location and Linkages looks at whether a project is part of a [...]

A friend asked for advice recently. She wanted to know what “sustainable” home design and interiors meant to us. For many, discussing the word leads to thinking about natural systems in equilibrium, of regeneration and renewal generation after generation. How can sustainable interiors and home design align with this, and how do you achieve [...]

So much of the process of winning big projects for your firm will be in the successful completion of RFPs or the slightly less challenging Request for Qualifications (RFQ). Remember your responses to such a document is your word, not just rhetoric to get the job that can be ignored once the project is underway. [...]

How many times have you found yourself in a business meeting wondering if the focus of the meeting is misplaced? It is not uncommon for business teams to concentrate on accomplishing tasks instead of the context of those projects being addressed. We all want to see progress, and sometimes it is easier to devote energy [...]

Here, we’ll look at architects and contractors as well.

ARCHITECTS - Architects typically deal with the structural aspects of a space. I say typically, because until the later part of the 20th century, most architects built buildings or houses. More recently, however, architects have extended their domain to include interior apartment renovations, encroaching somewhat onto the [...]

Common project delivery methods include the following:

Design-Bid-Build (DBB) is where an owner develops contract documents with an architect or engineer consisting of a set of blueprints and detailed specifications. Bids are solicited from contractors based on these documents. A contract is then awarded.
Construction Management (CM) might start with partially completed contract documents. An owner hires [...]

The Bloomberg New Energy Finance long-term forecast for the US photovoltaic market shows commercial deployment of PV systems continuing to increase faster than those in the residential market. Bloomberg predicts, however, a compounded annual growth rate for residential and commercial together to be about 22 percent through 2020.
Many may ask, “Where’s the investment going to [...]

There have already been a lot of articles written about this year’s ICSC  Recon 2012. Here is my opinion after wearing down the shoe leather with 35,000 fellow ICSC brethren.
First, it goes without saying that attendance was significantly better than the past few years. Last year was well below 30,000 attendees, and the last count I [...]

According to the biblical account in Genesis (11:5-8), the Tower of Babel was an enormous tower people planned to build up to heaven. God saw what they were doing and confounded their speech and that scattered them upon the face of the Earth. Confusing their language resulted in abandonment of the project. The people constructed the [...]