How Roger Accelerated Buyout on a $100M+ Multifamily Project

Kickoff. Roger set up the trade packages with the GC’s team. Roger joined after buyout had started, with a handful of scopes already out the door.

Drawing breakdown. Roger’s project managers used its AI tools to pull every item from the drawings, condense them into about 11,800 unique items, and assign each one to a trade.

Scope coordination (three meetings, the week before handoff). With a tight timeline at a busy time, Roger brought more of its team onto the project. Josh Whisenant, Roger’s CEO, led the sessions himself, walking the GC’s team through every item that didn’t clearly belong to one trade, and the two teams decided together where each one went. Luke Peterson, a Roger principal, and the rest of the team captured each decision, clarification, and RFI. The GC’s senior project manager says the sessions “filed away in the right scope of work… a lot of little tidbits that may have been lost and would have been difficult issues during the process of construction.”

Contract language. Roger drafted scope language for 61 scopes and drafted 90 RFIs for the GC. Each item links back to the drawing sheet it comes from.

Before handoff, Roger added the GC’s project-specific template language (general project requirements, safety exhibits, and required documents).

Buyout pace. About 72% of contracts were signed within three weeks. Within a few months, the job was more than 95% bought out by dollar value, with only a handful of contracts left, most of them small or years from starting. The senior project manager puts the pace at “half or better” the normal timeline.

Detail. Roger called out every item by location and linked it to its drawing sheet, where scopes normally use general language. The senior project manager estimates writing scopes at this level of detail in-house would have taken months.

Fewer disputes with subs. When subs red-lined their exhibits, Roger’s portal let the senior project manager pull up the item and its drawing sheet. “It’s so easy to find,” he says. With the drywall subcontractor, that settled a select few items up front.

Time back for the field. Without Roger, the senior project manager says, he’d be “bogged down for six to nine months doing contracts.” Instead, his team can “actually manage the project,” getting out in the field and “resolving problems ahead of time.”

The scope editor. Roger switched to a new scope editor partway through the project, and it had several bugs. The GC’s team spent time working around them while finalizing scopes. Roger has since resolved all of them.

Folding in existing scopes. Roger came on after buyout had begun, so some scopes had to be reconciled with the GC’s previous drafts. This was Roger’s first project reconciling scopes this way, and Roger has since built a process for folding a customer’s existing scopes into its own.

Splitting one trade between two subs. Some trades needed to go to two subs, such as flooring in the units vs. common areas. Roger offered to split them, but the GC’s team had already done it by hand. Roger has put this fix on its roadmap for future projects.

Finding a sub’s markups. When a sub marked up a scope PDF and sent it back, the GC found it hard to locate the matching paragraph in Roger’s editor. Roger has since aligned the portal’s numbering with the GC’s templates, so markups now map straight across.

One item in the wrong scope. Plaster grounds went into the plaster scope instead of framing, after framing had already been bought. The plaster sub flagged it as an extra. The GC’s fix: read every scope and move items to the right trade before the first contract goes out.

The buyout isn’t finished. The final timeline won’t be known until the last few contracts are signed.

Roger wasn’t the only factor. A contractual deadline made buyout the team’s top priority from the start.

The real test is still ahead. Construction is still in concrete and masonry. The senior project manager expects the detail to matter most in the finish trades, where small callouts usually get missed. Change orders so far have come from engineers’ bulletins, not scope gaps.

Start earlier. On the next project, Roger gets the drawings and holds scope coordination before buyout begins.

Contract schedules through Roger. Every contract schedule can now go through Roger, so one communication goes from the project team to the sub and back, and contract admin can send the contract with one click.

Ship trade splitting. It’s the one open fix from this project.

Find what else Roger can take on. A senior executive at the GC is brainstorming with his team on “what else can we have Roger do?”

A good fit. The senior project manager calls Roger a “good fit for the division as a whole.” Because the project started late, his team didn’t get to use everything Roger offers, and he says, “I look forward to the next project where I’m able to do that.”