WHAT'S NEW AT BRUCO.

07

Project News

Sanford Heart: 314 Residences, soon under way

Heartland's brownfields redevelopment at 314 Sanford Street in Waterkloof Ridge has cleared its concept stage and is moving toward a start on site. Bruco Group prepared the feasibility cost plans and preliminary estimates that carried the scheme to this point.

The site is ERF 967, a 3 072 m² sloped erf zoned Residential 3, redeveloped by Heartland as seven residential units. Rather than clear and start again, the scheme works within the existing structures on the property — retaining the established footprints, the mature planting and the site walls, and limiting new construction to double-level homes that respect the Waterkloof Ridge streetscape.

That restraint is deliberate, and it is measurable. The development builds to two storeys where three are permissible, covers 32.08% of the erf (985.47 m²) against the 40% allowed, and reaches a floor area ratio of 0.37 (1 145.56 m²) where 0.40 is permitted. Nineteen parking bays are provided against the seventeen required. The bulk left unused is not lost — it stays on the ground as communal open space, which is what makes a seven-unit development on a slope feel unhurried.

The architecture is quiet and material: fair-faced off-shutter concrete, stacked-stone retaining walls, vertical timber screening and charcoal metalwork, with pale limestone and muted sage in the finishes. A professional landscape designer has woven the existing planting into new green screening and xeriscape beds, so the development reads as part of the hillside rather than on top of it. Overlooks were designed out early — massing and screening isolate views so no home looks directly into a neighbour's.

Bruco Group's involvement to date has been feasibility cost planning and preliminary estimation ahead of tender, testing the scheme against the client's brief and the land before commitment. With the concept recommended and the design firming up, the next stages are measurement, cost plan and tender documentation, positioning Sanford 314 for a clean start on site.

Brownfields redevelopment is not a question of what you can build on a site, but of what the site will accept. Sanford 314 sits inside its entitlements — and the scheme is the better for it.

Bruco Group · Sanford 314 Residences

06

Product Launch

Introducing Bruco Tender Desk — smarter tender evaluation, better decisions

We're excited to launch Bruco Tender Desk, our new tender evaluation and recommendation software that makes the adjudication process faster and more reliable — while keeping the clarification process transparent and fair to all parties.

Tender adjudication is one of the most critical — and most contested — stages of any project. Comparing bids fairly, interrogating qualifications, and documenting why one tenderer was recommended over another has traditionally meant long hours, sprawling spreadsheets, and an audit trail that is hard to defend.

Bruco Tender Desk changes that. Tenders are evaluated side by side against consistent, weighted criteria, and the software builds a clear recommendation backed by a complete record of how every score was arrived at. The result is an adjudication process that is faster, more reliable, and far easier to stand behind.

Fairness is built in, not bolted on. Clarifications raised with one tenderer are logged and visible in the record, so every party is answered on the same footing and the process stays transparent from issue to award. For clients, that means confidence that the recommendation is sound; for tenderers, it means a process they can trust.

A tender recommendation should never rest on a spreadsheet nobody can follow. Tender Desk makes the adjudication record as rigorous as the evaluation itself.

Bruco Tender Desk · Bruco Group

05

Product Update

Drawdowns, now transparent — Bruco Contract Manager aligns with your funder's termsheet

Our Contract Manager platform now tracks the project against the funder's termsheet, turning drawdowns from a spreadsheet exercise into a clear, auditable process the whole team can see.

Project finance has always lived in a world of its own — separate from the construction record, reconciled in spreadsheets after the fact, and often the source of friction between the professional team and the funder. That gap is where delays and disputes over drawdowns start.

Bruco Contract Manager now reads against the funder's termsheet directly. As the project progresses, every certified payment, variation and cost movement is mapped to the conditions in the termsheet, so the drawdown position is visible in real time rather than reconstructed at month-end.

For the funder it means no more chasing certificates and reconciling figures — the drawdown pack assembles itself from the same record the professional team is already working in. For the client it means certainty that what is being drawn down matches what has actually been built. And for the professional team it means one source of truth, end to end.

Drawdown should be a function of the construction record, not a parallel exercise. When the termsheet and the build live in one place, transparency happens by default.

Bruco Contract Manager · Bruco Take-Off Pro

04

Our Technology

Software built in-house — exclusive to Bruco clients

Bruco Group offers clients something no other quantity surveying practice can: our own purpose-built software, developed in-house by quantity surveyors for quantity surveyors.

These platforms give the professional team live visibility over the project and remove the guesswork from measurement.

The Bruco Contract Manager Platform is a single environment where the professional team and the contractor communicate through the software rather than scattered email chains. Every role player contributes their own inputs under permissions set for their role, so the record is complete, current and auditable. It gives the professional a genuine project management tool and acts as an early-detection system — issues surface while they can still be resolved, not once they have become claims.

Bruco Take-Off Pro, our in-house measuring software, allows us to take off quantities faster and more accurately than conventional methods. Every measurement is recorded and traceable back to the drawing, which eliminates the arguments that so often arise over take-off quantities between the professional team and the contractor.

Better information, earlier — that is what our software gives a project team. Cost certainty follows from it.

Bruco Contract Manager · Bruco Take-Off Pro

03

Our Technology

Bruco Contract Manager — one platform that keeps the whole team bound to the contract

Contract administration should not live in inboxes. Bruco Contract Manager brings the professional team, the client and the contractor into a single environment where every instruction, claim, certificate and diary entry sits in one auditable record — and where the contract, not memory, sets the rules.

The hardest part of running a building or engineering contract is rarely the technical work — it is keeping everyone accountable to what the contract actually says. Notices lapse, instructions get given verbally, claims arrive months late with no contemporaneous record, and by the time the final account is prepared the team is reconstructing history from email chains.

Bruco Contract Manager is built to make that impossible. The platform is organised around the way a contract is actually administered — daily site records, open actions, RFIs, notifications, instructions, claims and risk on one side; variations, certificates, cost reporting, cashflow and funding on the other; and a reporting layer that shows the client exactly where the project stands. Each role player works in their own permissioned space, so the contractor, the professional team and the client all contribute to the same record rather than trading versions of it.

Because notices, instructions and claims are captured against contractual timeframes, the software becomes an early-warning system. Entitlement is dealt with while it is still a site issue, not once it has hardened into a dispute. Contract administration stops being a monthly scramble and becomes a by-product of the team simply doing its work in one place.

A contract only protects the parties if it is administered in real time. Contract Manager makes doing it properly the path of least resistance for the whole team.

Bruco Contract Manager · Bruco Group

02

Our Technology

Bruco Take-Off Pro — measurement made easy, accurate and argument-free

Take-off quantities are the foundation of every cost estimate, yet they have always been a source of dispute between the professional team and the contractor. Bruco Take-Off Pro changes that — measurements are taken off faster, more accurately, and every single one is traceable back to the drawing.

Quantity take-off is where cost certainty begins. Get the quantities wrong and every rate, every comparison and every certificate downstream is built on shaky ground. Traditionally, take-off has been slow, manual work — and the figures it produces are easy to contest, because there is no easy way to show exactly how each number was arrived at.

Bruco Take-Off Pro eliminates that weakness. Quantities are measured digitally, directly from the drawings, far faster and more accurately than conventional methods. Every measurement is recorded against the drawing it came from, so each figure can be traced back to its source in seconds. The arguments that so often erupt between the professional team and the contractor over take-off quantities simply fall away — the record speaks for itself.

For the client it means an estimate they can trust, and a cost position that holds up under scrutiny. For the professional team it means hours reclaimed from repetitive measurement, spent instead on the analysis that actually adds value. Measurement stops being a battleground and becomes what it should be: a reliable, auditable foundation for the whole project.

Measurement should never be a battleground. When every quantity is traceable to the drawing, the arguments disappear and the cost position stands on solid ground.

Bruco Take-Off Pro · Bruco Group

01

Project Completion

Signature residence completed in Xanadu Estate

Bruco Group is proud to have delivered the quantity surveying and contract management on a striking new private residence in Xanadu Estate — a 14-month build defined by demanding concrete work and truly high-end finishes, designed by Veld Architects.

The R16,36 million (incl. VAT) project ran over 14 months and tested every part of the construction team. The design by Veld Architects called for complex off-shutter and structural concrete elements that left no room for error in either execution or cost control — every pour had to be right the first time.

Bruco Group acted as quantity surveyor and contract administrator throughout, from procurement and tender adjudication through monthly payment certification, variation control and final account. Working from accurate, measured records meant the client always had a clear view of where the money was going — even on a build this technically demanding.

The finished home speaks for itself: crisp concrete lines, warm timber decking around the pool, and interiors finished to an exceptional standard. Our thanks go to the professional team and the contractor for a collaboration that delivered exactly what was drawn. Out of respect for our client's privacy, the owner's identity remains confidential.

Fourteen months, difficult concrete, exacting finishes — and a client who knew their cost position at every step. That is what good quantity surveying looks like.

Bruco Group