Employer's Agent: The Difference Between Chaos and Control
The Project That Taught Me Why This Role Exists A few years ago, a U.S.-based investor I worked with signed onto a design-and-build development in the UK without appointing anyone to represent his interests on-site. Six weeks in, the contractor had made a dozen small decisions, material substitutions, a shifted completion milestone, a minor design tweak, and not one of them had been run past the client first. Nothing was malicious. There just wasn't anyone whose actual job was to stand in the client's shoes and say wait, does this still match what we agreed to? By the time I got involved, unwinding those decisions cost more than hiring the right person from day one ever would have. That's the entire reason an Employer's Agent exists. Not paperwork. Not box-ticking. One person, clearly accountable, standing between a client's vision and a project's tendency to quietly drift off course. An Employer's Agent is the professional appointed under a JCT Design and...