Who actually chooses the frame

The brief was market size. The answer was a decision map.

The client makes an engineered wood product used as a structural frame. Steel holds the frame in most non residential buildings, and the client wanted to know where the switch to wood was worth chasing. The first half of the work was arithmetic. The second half was working out who actually makes the choice.

Sizing was done bottom up rather than lifted from a report. Every building type completed in a year was counted, multiplied by the average build cost for that type, then multiplied by the share of build cost the frame carries, which runs 10 to 12 per cent. That produced an identified market of about €150M a year across 1,935 steel framed buildings. It is a market size, not revenue available to win.

The concentration was sharper than expected. Industrial buildings and warehouses together carry more than half of it. Offices, the segment a materials pitch usually reaches for first, carry about five per cent. Agricultural buildings were sized but excluded from focus, because the framing decision there is made on a different basis entirely.

Why steel holds the position it holds

Steel was mapped across four stages, design, construction, use and demolition, against what each stakeholder in the chain actually wants. It wins on strength to weight, on building services routed inside the structural depth rather than below it, and on the fact that structural engineers hold load bearing templates for steel and have no equivalent for wood, so a wood frame has to be designed from the ground up. That is a working time cost carried by the engineer, and engineers are paid for time.

Steel also carries real weaknesses, and they are concentrated. Prices are volatile and set in international raw material markets, which pushes buyers to import and puts transport limits on prefabrication. Welding is skilled, dangerous and labour heavy. Thermal and acoustic performance is worse than timber, so insulation cost rises.

Fire is the exception worth knowing before anyone builds a pitch on it. Under the regulation reviewed, single storey buildings and secondary structures do not require fire protection for steel at all. In the two segments carrying most of the market, industrial and warehouse, fire is not a differentiator. Selling on it there is selling into a requirement the buyer does not have.

The construction company decides, and it is not the customer anyone was selling to

Interviews with structural engineers, purchasing directors, architects and a construction group all pointed the same way. The construction company sets the framing material, and it sets it before the investor sees a proposal.

Two mechanisms hold it there. The first is standardisation. Contractors quote what they have built before, because familiarity is what lets them price the risk and win on cost. The second is a network effect. The more a material is used, the more standard software, standard connections and standard details exist for it, which makes it cheaper again on the next project.

The consequence is uncomfortable. Consulting engineers and architecture practices largely propose what suits the contractor they expect to build it, so influencing the architect changes very little. The investor, who is the one who cares about sustainability and about lettable space, sees a shortlist that someone else already narrowed.

Where the opening actually is

Value, not cost, is the argument that survives this. Longer spans raise steelwork cost slightly and remove internal columns, and the second order effects run the other way: lighter foundations, fewer components, faster installation, no increase in cladding cost. Total building cost moves very little and usable flexibility goes up. The frame is 10 to 12 per cent of the build, so a frame argument made purely on frame price is arguing over a tenth of the money.

That reframes the target list, and not comfortably. The buildings where flexibility, tenant change and image are worth paying for are commercial and office. The segments with the largest identified market, industrial and warehouse, are also the ones least willing to pay for anything above the minimum.

So the recommendation was split. Compete on cost where the contractor decides and the specification is standard, and compete on value where the investor still holds the pen, accepting that this is the smaller half of the market.

What the client was left holding

A bottom up market model by building type that can be rerun as completion statistics update. A decision map naming who influences the framing choice at each stage and what each of them is measured on. And a cost benchmark for frame, floor and fire protection by building complexity, so a wood proposal can be set against a real number rather than an assertion.

Plus one instruction that cost nothing to act on. Stop persuading the architect. The architect is not deciding.