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Case Study

NAPKINS TO NUMBERS IN MINUTES

BACKGROUND

COMPANY: AMCAL MULTI-HOUSING
ABOUT COMPANY: Headquartered in Southern California, AMCAL’s mission is to build affordable, market-rate, student and workforce rental housing in California, Texas, and Washington that improves the lives of residents and enhances their future.
AMCAL’s preconstruction team works on so many projects every year. They create cost estimates for different projects from early stages of conceptual design through 100% CD set. While they are busy with shovel ready projects, they frequently receive request for “quick estimates” based on a conceptual design with just a site plan.

Challenge

They source current market pricing from subcontractors when they have DD or CD set but they heavily rely on their historical pricing data to create conceptual estimates. They had to identify a similar project they built recently, look up the cost in Procore Financials, calculate the unit pricing on a square foot or unit basis, apply cost escalation, and enter it in the spreadhseet where they are building the budget. They had to do this for every trade and line item in the budget, which is highly time consuming and can take up a few days to a couple of weeks just to produce a back of napkin estimate.

solution

AMCAL is now using Zebel in combination with Procore Financials to create such estimates in minutes, not weeks. They export the latest/current cost data from Procore to their historical cost database in Zebel. Next, they enter a dozen key parameters of the project, including location, site acreage, product type, unit mix, parking ratio, etc. and select any of their past projects imported from Procore and the software handles the rest of the work automatically and generates a full-blown estimate. Plus, they can instantly compare the estimate with their other projects and the market data Zebel aggregates from other multifamily developers and GC’s.
“Having the ability to pull current cost data right from our Procore budgets and import that data into Zebel is very powerful. We can now use fresh numbers in minutes to produce conceptual estimates on the latest deals. The days of relying on Excel and hoping formula errors didn’t skew the numbers are over.”
Gerry Huerta
VP of Construction AMCAL Multi-Housing

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