Due to tight markets more building projects get awarded purely based on the cheapest price. Do you think this is the right way forward?

Of course that this is not good.Cheapest does not necessarily mean quality, or even expensive does not mean it has quality.I will single out one example.The law has forced us to via public procurement choose the cheapest contractor, who was so bad and unprofessional, and he has made so many additional costs.That we took at the beginning the most expensive contractor, it would be for us most cheapest.I think these things should elect the recommendations and experiences.

It's up to state regulation to determine the right way forward, basically the approvement criteria, since one cannot start building without the proper licencing. Of course one thing is what is submitted for official approval, and another is what submit to the promoter. In most circumstances both things aren't equivalent, because from one end it's necessary to comply with every legal requisites and to do so one needs to spend more money. 

The correct way is by doing risk analysis, but it's going to take many decades until this level is attained by public officials and promoters.

When building projects get awarded purely based on the cheapest price, that is in some way good for client, if you have good supervising engineers, but that is rare. 

 

So, all in all i think it's bad, because client gets bad construction with a lot of additional works, because contractor wants to save the cost everywhere he can, and usualy at the expense of client.

 

And looking from the side of contractor, if you have a great contractor, no mather that he wants to do a great job, it will always be done better when he works for some reasonable price.

cost, time, quality triangle. if focus is purely on cost than quality and time will suffer eventually. there is cost of quality for conformance and sustainable construction doesn't mean reducing cost.

I endorse answers given by the Experts. Thanks

One side of the Project Management Triangle - Scope, Schedule and Cost  - cannot be changed without affecting the others. 

usually it goes to the lowest bitter, however when these contractors subcontract and the subcontractor subcontract again, the quality of the project usually suffers ... cheapest is not always the best and subcontracting should be a minimum in order to make sure the quality of the work is garantied 

I enormously agree with your view Romas , I think that projects should be build on term on quality assuarnce and environment sustainbility rather build upon cheap price to secure long term sucess and avoid wasting materials and resources. Regards   

 

The approach of givING the project to the cheapest tender should be governed and gated by pre qualifying contractors before accepting the commercial offer as it would be a good measure of the contractor capability to execute the project. So you protect your project agenist the low quality cheap contractor. Other gates should apply. It is all about configuring a sound tender process which give you the best of every part of the project without losing on any of the project triangle elements

From the environmental perspective, I personally believe we are building something which is cheap, low quality, uncomfortable, impractical spaces, and certainly not going to last a reasonable cycle. To me this is a huge waste in terms of materials, workmanship, people skils and land.

Do you agree?

Thanks for the invitation, of course this isnt the right way. I agree with experts.