Property & Contracting

How it works together

Three modules, one estate tree. A project, a block, a building, a floor and an individual flat are levels of the same structure, and each module writes to it from a different direction.

1. Price the work before it is won. A priced bill of quantities is built term by term, and underneath each term an analysis card explodes it into material, own labour, subcontracted work and other expense. The quoted rate is the consequence of that build-up rather than a number somebody typed over it.
2. Spend against the term, not against the project. Material issues, subcontractor certificates, daily labour sheets, plant allocations and miscellaneous invoices all deposit their cost against the term code they belong to, which is why actual cost and tendered rate can sit in the same row and be compared.
3. Name the unit on the term. One column on the contract’s terms grid is the whole of the configuration — or, with one setting flipped, the matching line of the analysis card. That single field is what turns a contractor’s records into a developer’s.
4. Let the cost fall down the tree. Cost recorded against “the tower” is apportioned to every flat under it, level by level, weighted by area or by estimated cost. The mechanics, including the worked example and the trap in adding the levels together, are in pushing cost onto real estate units.
5. Sell the unit, or lease it. A sale is one event with a long tail of instalments behind it; a lease is a long event whose revenue is earned period after period. They are two document chains and two licences over the same estate record, which is what lets one tower have sold apartments above leased ground-floor shops.
6. Recognise the cost at the right moment. The cost accumulated on a unit before it was handed over is what the sales contract can book as its cost of sale; anything that arrives afterwards is swept separately and nets off what was already booked, so a snagging invoice in September charges only the increment.

The lump sums a developer absorbs that never passed through a construction contract — the land, the permit, the lift installation, the marketing campaign — arrive by a second and entirely separate path, described in distributing project costs over properties. Both paths end as cost on the same units. They are maintained by different documents, so an implementation should decide early which kind of money travels by which route.

Built for how the region actually works

Very few property groups here do only one of these three things. The company that tendered for a government job this year is developing a compound next year and holding the retail floor of it as an income stream, and the same finance team carries all three sets of books. That is why these modules share an estate tree and a ledger instead of being sold as three products — the alternative is a consolidation exercise every month between systems that disagree about what a building is.

The detail follows the same instinct. Advances are recovered from certificates under the repayment rule that was actually agreed, retention sits where the contract puts it, and an instalment plan running years past handover is described in a few fields rather than typed line by line. Rent is earned month by month even when the tenant pays quarterly, and a manager with four hundred shops collects the first of the month in one document rather than four hundred receipts. All of it is Arabic-first: a unit code, a tenant’s name and a printed payment schedule render right-to-left without a second template.