Performance Specification - Construction Documents and Services - A.R.E. Live

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Mike: All right, number three, "A performance specification relies on," let's see. And then answer A would be commissioning to confirm performance one year after substantial completion. Answer B would be a description of how a material needs to perform without specifying the maker of the material. Number C would be a series of at least three choices of each material topic. And then D, the addition of "or equal" in order to provide opportunities for the contractor to find cheaper but equivalent materials. So what this is really talking about is, there are two basic kinds of specification books, and the two basic kinds are proprietary and performance.
There's a couple different names, there's lots of different versions of each one, but the two ideas here are, proprietary is when I say, "All right, here's the thing I want you to put in." So let's say it's, an example I usually use is carpet. Let's say it's a particular kind of a carpet, and so I'm going to say it's a Mannington or it's another carpet maker, and I'm going to give you a specific example of a particular carpet, and the model number, and all the accompanying information. And then the contractor, when they bid the project, is going to include that particular carpet choice in their estimate, and then when they build out the project, when they've been chosen as the GC, would actually install that particular carpet that you would…it's a proprietary. You've said a particular named project, a named material.
Sometimes proprietary, you might have three different named materials. That's a classic thing, give a little bit of variety so that for some reason, one of them is much more expensive than you thought, then that gives you a way of giving a couple of choices, sometimes giving three, just gives…One contractor may have a relationship with one distributor, and another contractor may have a relationship with a different distributor. It's not really a reasonable thing to choose a contractor based on the fact that their carpet supplier doesn't carry the specific one that you chose. So there's bunch of reasons that you might have more than one name, but essentially a proprietary system is where you're naming the particular materials. So it could be hardware for doors, hinges and handles, and that kind of thing, it could be carpeting, it could be different drywall types.
Anything that's being named, it would be a named thing where the specific maker and model would be given. That's proprietary. A performance spec is where you're saying, "Okay, I'm not going to give you the name of the material. What I'm going to give you is what I need to have happen from this material." So for the carpet you might say, it has to be a carpet that has a flame spread of such-and-such, and an acoustic NC rating of such-and-such, and a durability rating from whatever the durability folks on carpets would be of whatever that important thing you would need. And so you would be giving what performance you need to get from that carpet, or from that door handle, or from that drywall system.
And then the contractor's job is to then find an appropriate material that meets the performance. So this is kind of a funny thing, it's two very different ways of approaching these different ideas of how you approach choosing materials. One is that the architect is in full control and is naming the products, and the other one is saying, "This is the kind of thing we need, this is the performance we need. Find us something that you think will be good." And the whole point of a performance specification is that if the idea behind it is, if the contractor has the freedom to look around and find something that meets all the needs, they have a strong desire because they're bidding against other contractors. They have a strong desire to have their number be lower.
And so they're looking for a way to bring the numbers down, but then they still have to meet the performance. And so the idea here is, it's a way to get the contractors to find better, cheaper materials that still meet the performance that you need them to meet. So when you see a question about performance specifications, it's almost always about helping the owners get a cheaper building, because you're providing enough information that the contractors are able to get the right kind of product that's going to meet the performance needs, but that they have the choice to find cheaper versions than maybe the architect even knows about. One of the things you'll notice is that when you something and you get one of those big binders from a manufacturer, they almost never have the price list in them.