I’m a consultant with my own one man band set-up and was wondering about spending £2000 on doing a BREEAM course later this year. Is there a good call for assessment work? Is it worth spending £2000 of my own cash on becoming a licensed assessor? Probably mainly looking at Industrial buildings.

Thanks!

Bream assessors..? This one’s a monster..

there is talk of BREEAM being scrapped/dropped.

Are they going to bring it more in line with LEED?

Rickos,

I did a Breeam assessors course a few years back through work, and although I have had a few projects go through a breeam assessment most seem to fall short somewhere or it just gets knocked on the head when the cost spirals out of control. The problem is that its not really a mandatory badge for a building and just serves as kudos for the project if it gets a good rating.
I have never used the qualification in a self employed consultants guise(which is where the cash was)or for that matter at all. I really believe that it is going to die out some time soon or get replaced by another medium….such as Code for sustainable homes etc. For the money if its your own I would be very reluctant to do the course, it was pretty much just a poke in direction and an over view then the rest was a lot of assignments and reports which eventually get signed off by BRE. The bubble if there was one has pretty much burst now and seems to be taken up by the likes of a few energy/technology consultants such as Vinci. Im not saying that you couldn’t make a living doing this or Code assessing but it gets very boring very quickly and most companies you have to work with dont really give a damn and only count the costs so you end up fighting a hard battle to get the details and information needed. I guess it really depends on what sort of work you enjoy but it wasn’t for me.

Hmmm, thanks donks. I know that some (mostly in London?) authorities are insisting on BREEAM ratings for significant (big size) projects, which most industrial stuff is moving towards. I do find report writing pretty dull though, but could do with another string to my bow at the moment. However, as you rightly say, it’s a voluntary scheme on the whole so maybe the work isn’t necessarily there to add to my other stuff anyway.

*ponders some more*

I use BREEAM and Code pretty regularly. I was looking at the possiblity of also going on a course however given the time I would spend on it I wouldn’t get to do much architecture related stuff which is my main passion. I don’t see it dying though, I’m using it on a lot of schemes [mixed use resi] at the moment, more so than Code this month .

As a project manager we tend to tag it onto the services consultants brief so if you were to do it I would get close to some smaller consultancies who can sell your service as a more complete service under their umbrella

I can’t see it becoming redundant just yet as any public sector end user is demanding it and there is a definite art in managing the process to target the easier/ cheaper points especially if they have set a target of so many points or an excellent grading- to me that where the niche is I have had sone guys who just score the project but where you make yourself invaluable is helping the design process to achieve the target

Anyway of my soapbox now!

Taff,
It will defiantly eat into all of your time and become your main job which is something that I wasn’t keen on. It may still be quite prevalent on certain schemes but the ones we worked on tended to be on the smaller scale of commercial under 1M and it just ramped the costs of the project up to a point where it even got binned on more than one occasion due to the pre assessment (plus a bit of Part L).

Have you looked at energy assessments? Not of existing housing, but of new builds (SAP assessments), if you already work in the field you should have contacts that you can harvest.

I think this is the most important thing, think about another service you can provide to your existing customer base rather than a new service that you need to generate a whole new ccustomer base for.