The 80/20 Rule: Why Property Selection Determines Project Success
80% of success is selecting the right property. It's a principle we've proven time and again across our high-performance fit-outs in laboratories, healthcare facilities, and radiopharmaceutical spaces. The remaining 20%, design, construction, and delivery, is where we excel. But without the right property foundation, even the most brilliant execution can't overcome fundamental limitations.
Why Property Selection Matters More Than You Think
In specialised construction, particularly for pathology labs, pharmaceutical manufacturing, and healthcare facilities, the property you choose isn't just a location… it's a critical constraint that shapes every decision that follows. The wrong property can turn a straightforward project into a costly exercise in compromise.
We've witnessed this firsthand. When transforming a three-level residential building into a radiopharmaceutical facility, the existing structure dictated our approach to ISO 7 cleanrooms, radioactive shielding, and service integration. Similarly, our work consolidating BVAQ's three separate facilities into Australia's largest food testing laboratory at 9,500m² required a property that could accommodate complex laboratory systems, stringent compliance requirements, and future growth.
The Hidden Costs of Poor Property Selection
Selecting a property without understanding your technical requirements creates cascading problems:
Structural Limitations: Not every building can support the load requirements of heavy laboratory equipment, extensive HVAC systems, or the vibration-sensitive instruments used in pathology and testing facilities. Retrofitting structural support is expensive and often impossible without major disruption.
Services and Infrastructure: High-performance spaces demand robust electrical capacity, specialised plumbing, gas systems, and data infrastructure. Properties lacking adequate services require costly upgrades that eat into budgets and extend timelines. Our ALS Laboratory project in New South Wales required extensive redesign to eliminate services issues apparent in the original documentation, challenges that proper property assessment could have identified earlier.
Compliance and Certification: NATA accreditation, ISO compliance, GMP standards, FDA regulations, these aren't add-ons you can retrofit easily. Properties must accommodate controlled environments, appropriate zoning, contamination control, and the spatial relationships these certifications demand.
Ceiling Heights and Floor Plates: Cleanroom installations, extensive ducting for contamination control, and overhead service distribution all require generous ceiling heights. Open floor plates enable efficient laboratory layouts and future flexibility. Compromising on these dimensions creates ongoing operational inefficiencies.
The Connected Approach: Early Engagement, Better Outcomes
This is precisely why our methodology integrates strategy, design, and construction from day one. Our Discovery phase exists to help clients understand what their property must deliver before they commit.
Pre-commitment Property Assessment: We evaluate potential properties against your technical requirements, identifying constraints before they become problems. This includes structural capacity, services adequacy, compliance pathways, and spatial efficiency.
Risk Identification: Our early engagement model ensures that potential issues, from inadequate loading capacity to challenging authority approvals, are identified when you still have options, not after you've signed a lease.
Cost Certainty: By understanding property limitations upfront, we provide accurate budgeting that reflects real-world constraints. No surprises, no variations, no finger-pointing about who should have known what.
Real-World Success Through Strategic Property Selection
Our zero-variation track record and defect-free handovers aren't just about construction excellence, they're built on the foundation of honest property assessment. When BVAQ needed to consolidate operations, we worked through the Discovery phase to ensure their chosen campus could genuinely deliver on their vision for Australia's largest food testing laboratory. The result? A solution-focused approach that achieved their business objectives without the costly compromises that plague poorly planned projects.
The Questions You Must Answer First
Before committing to any property for a high-performance fit-out, ask:
Can this building support the structural loads my equipment and systems require?
Does the existing services infrastructure support my operational needs, or will major upgrades be necessary?
Will ceiling heights accommodate cleanroom installations and service distribution?
Can floor plates be configured to meet workflow efficiency and future flexibility?
Are there clear pathways to required certifications and compliance standards?
What authority approvals will be needed, and are there any property-specific constraints?
Why This Matters to Your Bottom Line
Poor property selection creates variations, delays, and compromises that undermine even the best construction partners. The right property, assessed against realistic technical requirements, enables our fixed-fee, lump-sum contracts to deliver genuine cost certainty.
At Connected, we've built our reputation on program certainty and zero variations, but that's only possible when projects start with honest property assessment. Our integrated approach ensures that by the time construction begins, every element has been meticulously planned, every risk identified, every constraint understood.
80% of success is selecting the right property. Let us help you get that decision right from the start.
Ready to discuss your next high-performance project?
Our Discovery phase provides the clarity and certainty you need to make confident property decisions. Contact Connected to learn how our integrated approach delivers better outcomes from concept to completion.