In the upper echelons of the residential design industry, owner’s reps have become more and more common—this is no secret—but until you start asking architects, contractors and designers about the rise of the rep, it’s easy to miss the anxiety they can evoke. Several declined an interview altogether. One told me that speaking too candidly about owner’s reps would be like “pissing off the IRS or the FBI.”
Owner’s reps generate a lot of big feelings in the design industry because they have become a big deal. While there are no hard statistics about their numbers, anecdotal evidence only points in one direction: They’re on the rise. “About 15 years ago, of the 22 jobs we had, there may have been two with owner’s reps,” says Josh Wiener, the founder and CEO of New York–based high-end general contracting firm SilverLining. “Today it’s probably 17 of 26. … It’s a big shift in the industry.”
There’s also no hard definition of what exactly they do on a project—their range of responsibilities can vary. But as the world of owner’s reps becomes more professionalized, they exert real power over what happens on a job site. In my conversations with designers, there was a palpable sense—accurate or not—that a bad working relationship with the rep could not only get them fired, but hurt future prospects as well.
On the other side of that agita, many designers have come to appreciate the sense of order that a levelheaded rep can bring to a project—namely, their ability to referee territorial disputes and to expedite decisions. On a recent episode of The Business of Home Podcast, San Francisco designer Steven Volpe said that while he initially balked at having owner’s reps on his projects, he quickly changed his mind.
“I realized that these added layers of management really helped us and helped the project,” he told host Dennis Scully. “When I would get these bigger projects, [I started to] request that there was a client’s rep.”
Love them, fear them or insist on them, reps have become a real force at the high end of the residential design industry. Here’s what to know.
THE EVOLUTION OF THE REP
Go back a few decades, and the phrase “owner’s rep” likely conjured up something fairly informal. Most residential design projects didn’t have them, even at the high end. In some cases, a truly busy client—or a famous one—would enlist a lawyer or an accountant to oversee the construction phase of a project and keep an eye on the budget. In other cases, it was a member of the entourage with too much time on their hands.
For the most part, the owner’s reps of yore did not have prior design industry experience. This contributed to the sense of skepticism among designers and architects. The general view: At best, they were indifferent bean counters. At worst, they were meddlers who saw their only job as scaling back the budget. New York designer Jamie Drake recalls an experience from decades ago with a full-time employee his client hired to handle “all the properties, as well as planes and boats and toys.” At the end of the day, says Drake, he was “just an inside guy with maybe his own agenda.” This was typical.
The friend-of-a-friend version of the owner’s rep still exists, but over the past 15 years, a new generation has emerged. This class of reps tends to have experience in contracting or construction management, and they bring a professionalized approach to their work. The old rep worked only for one client; the modern rep runs a firm that works with multiple homeowners. The field has gone from a loose collection of individuals to a genuine industry.
Rick Peña is a good example. After graduating from Georgia Tech with a degree in architecture, he began pursuing a career in construction management, working on projects like the Four Seasons in Miami and a 20,000-square-foot custom home for a local real estate developer. Eventually he went back to school to earn a dual MBA with concentrations in real estate and finance. When he started his firm, Prime Group Management, he was already well-qualified as an owner’s rep. Now, 17 years later, PGM is one of the more in demand in Southeast Florida, working on projects by starchitects and AD100 designers alike.
“You have all this migration of wealth in Miami, with ultrahigh-net-worth clients building very unique homes. Those opportunities weren’t here six years ago,” says Peña. “Ten or 15 years ago in my career, building a 20,000-square-foot house at $1,500 per square foot was a big deal. Today, the starting point for our clients is more like $2,000 to $2,500 per square foot, and the average is closer to $3,500 to $4,000. … In Miami, for a $15 million dollar–plus build, pretty much all of them have an owner’s rep.”
It’s hard to pin down the rise of the rep to a single factor, but most people agree on a few root causes. The simplest is wealth. Over the past decade, the U.S. economy has seen a tremendous rise in the number of affluent people, and an incredible concentration at the top. The shift was particularly significant during the pandemic and its aftermath—in 2024, the country minted an average of 1,000 new millionaires every day.
All of that wealth has led to more ambitious construction and renovation projects, many of which end up taking on the scale of commercial work (where owner’s reps have long been a fixture). Joe Meringolo, the founder of owner’s rep firm JSM Project Management, floated the intriguing theory that the rise of wellness has played a part—when every new home has a gym, an infrared chamber and a hammam, construction projects need an orchestrator to pull the various pieces together. “You’ve got a much larger client base with much larger wealth,” he says. “Because of that, clients are able to dream a little bit bigger; they’re able to demand a little bit more.”
Affluence has also gotten more complicated, and the affluent themselves are busier and more mobile. As wealthy clients spread out across multiple homes, often in multiple countries, the need for central oversight becomes more pronounced. “It used to be that the architect was entrusted with the family’s money ... but now you have six homes, you have an airplane, and there’s a lot more complexity to all the different players and the reporting that has to be done,” says Wiener. “I had a client once say to me in a meeting, ‘You have no idea how hard it is to have four homes.’”
Whatever the root cause, the effect is clear. Firms like Peña’s and Meringolo’s have waiting lists for their services, and new businesses are springing up left and right. The world of reps is also seeing some consolidation, as larger players that have historically focused on the commercial world are buying smaller companies with a residential specialty.
Residential-only startups are growing as well. Fifteen years ago, Grant Bowen was working in-house at a family office, managing estate projects for a well-known tech entrepreneur. In 2014 he struck out on his own and founded Peak Projects, an owner’s rep firm focused on bringing a data-driven approach to planning projects and an empathy-driven approach to managing them. Twelve years later, Peak fields a 75-person team working on more than 120 projects nationwide.
“I’ve always taken an empathetic, collaborative, data-based and rigorous approach, and that just really hit the San Francisco market well,” says Bowen. “We’ve taken that ethos and hired great people with high EQ. … I think that’s why we’ve been able to grow.”
HOW REPS WORK
Like designers, there are no two reps whose businesses are exactly alike, but there are a few common points. One is that reps are far more commonly hired on new construction work and big renovations than on redecorating projects. Truly deep-pocketed clients might hire a rep to oversee a powder-room spruce-up, but in general, the added expense of paying their monthly retainer makes the most sense for complex jobs that stretch into the double-digit millions and beyond.
Though there’s also variation in the way that reps charge, most tend to cohere around hourlies or monthly retainers, and a high-end rep firm can bring in tens of thousands a month for close supervision on a complex project. Among those I spoke to, many cited percentage-based billing as a red flag—there was a general agreement that reps should look to remain agnostic to the overall cost of a project.
The true variation starts to kick in when it comes to individual expertise. Peña’s firm’s approach is to take on a very small number of jobs and flood the zone with expertise. Bowen pointed out that Peak has access to 12 years of data on high-end residential projects that gave its estimates a unique precision. Meringolo says that bringing on a former Gensler employee, Tanya Bawa, as a partner brought his firm specialized expertise on the design side of the equation. Some reps have specific regional knowledge, while others excel at a particular type of project.
On a practical week-to-week level, most reps will sit in on stakeholder meetings, be a regular presence on the job site, and maintain constant communication between architects, designers, contractors and the client. At the very least, expect projects with reps to have more documentation and more check-ins.
But the value that a good rep provides to their clients is less about maintaining a spreadsheet and more about seeing around corners. Peña sees one of the core tasks of his job as understanding “gray areas” that exist in complicated projects, or the gap between the architect’s drawings, the contractor’s schedule and the designer’s vision. A spec might call for 13-by-8-foot glass windows—knowing that it won’t automatically pass inspection in Miami-Dade County might save a year and a million dollars in testing costs.
Modern reps are also clearly aware of their profession’s baggage. They all took pains to point out that they don’t see their role as sitting atop the project like a dictator, or acting as a barrier between designers and clients. “People make an assumption that we’re going to cut off communications, and we do the opposite,” says Jessica Henry, the senior director of strategic partnerships and marketing at Peak Projects. “We understand the importance of designers, in particular, collaborating directly with the client and building that level of trust. … We’re not here to report failings. We’re here to help people get ahead of them and be successful.”
A NEW DYNAMIC
The collaborative approach has earned some fans. Many designers pointed out that conscientious owner’s reps were helpful in resolving some of the thorny issues that pop up on complex projects. For example, often the client has the closest emotional bond with the designer, and will come to designers first with an issue—even if it’s a structural concern over a concrete slab, clearly an issue for the architect or contractor. Without an owner’s rep, that all-too-common scenario can tee up a confusing game of telephone that leaves no one happy. Having a neutral presence who can navigate territorial questions makes those dilemmas much less prickly.
Designers also appreciate that good reps can get decisions made quickly—especially when an owner is frequently traveling, or too buried in work to make a choice on fabric samples. And reps bring welcome validation for the real costs of a high-end design project.
“[Working with a rep] can make the money super easy,” says Los Angeles designer Harrison Soll. “Someone else is going over the estimates with the client, and it makes it sexier to not have to really get into it. [To] have someone rip the Band-Aids off for you—there are definitely positives to it.”
However, there’s undeniably still potential for friction between reps and the professionals they work with, and every designer I spoke with had at least a handful of negative experiences. In many cases, the dispute was centered around budget issues. There was a general sense that reps sometimes had a hard time getting into the headspace of a truly wealthy client, and could hurt the quality of a project by trying to shave a few thousand dollars off of the budget—essentially, missing the forest for the trees.
Many designers were also frustrated by the sense that reps can become a communication bottleneck, or add a new cook to an already crowded kitchen. “It’s another layer,” says Soll. “You have to communicate with this person, and then you have to communicate with that person, and then this person is going to have questions.” Worse still when a rep becomes a relentless critic of the project.
“Most owner’s reps look for solutions,” says Drake. However, he recalls a particularly difficult rep with a “Green Beret mentality”: “This one was always saying, ‘That's impossible, that can’t be done.’”
To be fair, many of the horror stories can be boiled down to simply: “I like working with good reps. I don’t like working with bad reps.” And perhaps it’s no surprise that the role—which, by definition, involves an element of oversight—carries some risk of tension. Ask a star athlete how they feel about refs, and you’re going to get a mixed response.
But as owner’s reps become more and more common, the rules of the road are becoming more clear. And despite the occasional pothole, designers, architects, contractors and reps alike all tend to agree that at the end of the day, it’s about the project. “[Our attitude is]: Everybody’s at the table, everybody solves the problem—attitudes and egos at the door,” says Meringolo. “Let’s just get the job done.”
