Every question, answered straight.

An owner’s representative is a construction professional hired by the property owner to represent the owner’s interests to everyone else on the project — contractors, subcontractors, designers, vendors, inspectors and lenders.

Think of it as having your own expert on your side of the table. I read the bids, verify the trades, manage the schedule, check the invoices, inspect the work and translate the whole thing into decisions you can actually make. What I do not do is build the work or profit from it.

On most of the projects I take, no — and that is one of the main reasons to hire me.

A general contractor earns their fee two ways: coordinating the trades, and carrying the risk of the job. The coordination is exactly what I do. So on a renovation where you are willing to contract with the trades directly, the GC becomes a layer of markup rather than a layer of value — overhead and profit priced into framing, plumbing, electrical, tile and every other line, invisible to you because it is baked into the number.

Instead: I write the scope, get it bid by vetted trades in your market, help you choose, and then run the sequence — permits, inspections, rough-in, insulation, drywall, paint, cabinets, punch list. Same trades, same finish date, one flat fee that does not grow when your budget does.

When you do still want a GC: heavy structural work, a ground-up build, or a lender or insurer that requires a single licensed GC of record. I will tell you plainly when you are in that situation — and then my job becomes vetting that GC, reading their contract, and holding them to it.

A general contractor is hired to build the project and is paid out of the construction budget. Their incentive, structurally, is to complete the work profitably — a perfectly legitimate business, but not the same as protecting your money.

I am paid a separate flat fee to represent you, and I never hold or spend a dollar of your construction budget. The practical difference is who the trades answer to and who is watching the number. On a Haven project the trades contract with you, and the person coordinating them is the person whose only job is your outcome.

No. Never. You contract with and pay your trades and vendors directly. Haven’s fee is billed separately and is entirely independent of what the construction costs.

This is deliberate. The moment a representative handles the construction budget, the incentives get muddy. Keeping the money away from me is what makes my advice trustworthy.

Haven charges a flat project fee for an agreed scope — not an hourly rate, and not a percentage of construction spend. On-site visits are quoted at a fixed rate per visit, all-inclusive of travel, anywhere in the lower 48.

The fee depends on the size and complexity of the project, so I quote it after the first conversation. You will have the number in writing before you commit to anything, and it does not move unless the scope moves.

Because both of the alternatives create the wrong incentive.

An hourly meter makes you hesitate before calling with a question — and the questions you hesitate on are usually the expensive ones. A percentage of construction spend quietly rewards me when your budget goes up, which is precisely the opposite of the job.

A flat fee means I am paid to run a clean project that finishes. That is the only alignment that survives a hard week.

Yes — anywhere in the lower 48. Haven is built to run remote projects. Current work includes Frankfort, Kentucky and Lanesville, New York, managed from an office in Manhattan, Kansas.

Remote management is not a compromise here; it is the design. Site visits are scheduled against milestone gates — the moments where something is about to be covered up — rather than by calendar habit, which is both more useful and cheaper than a representative who lives down the road and drops by aimlessly.

Earlier than most people think. The highest-value moment is before you close on the property. A pre-purchase scope and budget review costs a fraction of a full engagement and can tell you the deal does not work while you can still walk away from it.

The second-best moment is before you sign a construction contract, while the scope and bids can still change. After construction starts I can still take a project over — that happens regularly — but some decisions will already be spent.

Sometimes the honest answer is no, and I will say so.

If you live near the property, have run renovations before, and have a contractor you have used successfully, you may not need an owner’s rep. Where the value is real: you are out of market, the budget is large enough that a ten-percent overrun genuinely hurts, the property has complications like flood zones or permitting risk, you have never done this before, or your time is worth more than the fee.

Tell me the situation on a call and I will tell you which one you are in.

That is a normal event, not a crisis, and it has a process.

First we establish why — a genuinely under-scoped original estimate, a hot local trade market, a condition discovered on site, or a padded number. Those four lead to four different responses. Then we lay out the options with real figures: cut scope in priority order, re-bid specific trades, phase the work, or walk away from the project.

Scope gets ranked as must-have, should-have and nice-to-have before construction begins precisely so that this conversation is a five-minute decision rather than a two-week argument.

Roughly fifteen minutes a week, plus the decisions only you can make.

You get one written update a week — progress, budget position, schedule status, and a short list of anything needing you, with the time-critical item flagged first. If nothing needs you, the list is empty and you read four bullet points. I do not call at 6:40 in the morning, I do not forward you contractor arguments, and I do not ask you to referee scheduling.

The whole premise is that the project should occupy roughly none of your attention between decisions. If you are thinking about it daily, I am not doing my job.

One written update every week — progress made, budget position, schedule status, and a short grouped list of decisions that need you with the time-critical one flagged first.

Plus photo-documented milestone gates, so you can see rough-in before it is covered, insulation before drywall, and drywall before paint, whether or not you are within a thousand miles of the site. You should never be the least-informed person about your own project.

I coordinate them and hold them to the schedule and the budget. Selections are usually where a renovation quietly loses six weeks, because cabinets run four to six weeks out and windows four to five, and nobody sets the decision deadlines backwards from the install date.

On a Haven project every selection has a specification, a lead time and a decision deadline attached. If you are working with a designer, I work with them. If you are not, I will help you make choices that hold up and that a guest or a buyer will actually pay for.

Yes — it is the core of the practice, and I own and operate short-term rentals myself. Bought with my own money, renovated with my own money, and still running them.

That matters more than it sounds. An STR renovation is not a homeowner renovation with nicer photos. Durability under 150 turnovers a year, how fast a cleaner can reset the space, which rooms photograph well enough to win the click, real sleeping capacity versus advertised, and the specific amenities that actually move a nightly rate — all of it changes where the money should go. I have made the wrong call on a finish and paid for it out of my own account, which is a more reliable teacher than a spec sheet.

And the opening date is the business case. Every week a rental sits unfinished is nightly revenue you never recover, in a season you cannot re-run. Protecting that date is treated as a budget item, not a nice-to-have.

From single-property renovations through multi-property acquisition programs. Current clients include investors buying on a schedule who need a repeatable renovation process rather than one-off firefighting.

If a project is too small for the fee to make sense for you, I will tell you that on the first call rather than after you have signed.

For the first call: the address, roughly what you want to do with the property, your target budget or target return, and any photos, plans or inspection reports you already have. That is enough to have a genuinely useful twenty minutes.

If we go forward, discovery covers the rest.

Haven & Co, LLC is a Kansas limited liability company. As an owner’s representative I do not perform construction work, so I do not hold a contractor’s licence — the trades on your project do, and verifying that is part of my job.

I am glad to walk through Haven’s insurance, the engagement agreement and exactly what is and is not covered before you sign anything. Ask on the call.