The good news for U.S. property developers is that the cost of construction disputes in the past year has gone down, claims the 2015 “Global Construction Disputes” report from Arcadis, a global design and consultancy firm. The firm estimates that the average value of construction disputes in North America has decreased to $29.6 million in 2014, from $34.3 million in 2013. The bad news is that it now takes 1.9 months longer to resolve those disputes, at an average of 16.2 months. In the interest of preventing the problems that create disputes in the first place, Arcadis also provided a list of top five issues that lead to them. Here is what they found (the research was based on construction disputes handled by Arcadis Construction Claims Consulting and EC Harris Contract Solutions):
