The Commercial Real Estate Revolution: Nine Transforming Keys to Lowering Costs, Cutting Waste, and Driving Change in a Broken Industry

As it currently operates, the commercial real estate construction industry is a disaster full of built-in waste. Seventy-percent of all projects end over budget and late. The buildingSMART Alliance estimates that up to fifty-percent of the process is consumed in waste. Almost every project includes massive hidden taxes in the form of delays, cost overruns, poor quality, and work that has to be redone. Building new structures is a fragmented, adversarial process that commonly results in dissatisfied customers and frequently ends in disappointment, bitterness, and even litigation.

The industry must change―for its own good and that of its customers. But while the industry has tried to reform itself, it can’t do it alone. Real change can only come from business owners and executives who refuse to continue paying for a dysfunctional system and demand a new way of doing business.

The Commercial Real Estate Revolution is a bold manifesto for change from the Mindshift consortium―a group of top commercial real estate industry leaders who are fed up with a system that simply doesn’t work. The book explains how business leaders can implement nine principles for any project that will dramatically cut costs, end delays, create better buildings, and force the industry into real reform.

The Commercial Real Estate Revolution offers a radically new way of doing business―a beginning-to-end, trust-based methodology that transforms the building process from top to bottom. Based on unifying principles and a common framework that meets the needs of all stakeholders, this new system can reform and remake commercial construction into an industry we’re proud to be a part of.

If you’re one of the millions of hardcore cynics who work in commercial construction, you probably think this sounds like pie in the sky. But this is no magic bullet; it’s a call for real reform. If you’re an industry professional who’s sick of letting down clients or an owner who’s sick of cost overruns and endless delays, The Commercial Real Estate Revolution offers a blueprint for fixing a broken industry.

REX MILLER is a consultant and veteran sales and management executive in commercial interiors and project delivery. He helped create the Mindshift consortium, made up of top executives from America’s largest construction and architecture firms, which creates new paradigms and practices for the commercial real estate industry.

DEAN STROMBOM is a Principal at Gensler, the world’s largest architectural firm.

MARK IAMMARINO is Vice President and General Manager of Special Projects for Turner, the largest construction company in the United States.

BILL BLACK is National Director of Strategic Business Solutions at Haworth, a leading manufacturer of commercial office interiors.