Introduction to Contracts

So we've been talking a lot about the different contracts and we thought we just take a minute and run through some of those contracts so that you can see the actual contract and what it looks like and see how it's organized and see some of the terminology that we've discussed in context. So we've go the A101 which is the owner-contractor agreement and then we've got the B101 which is the owner-architect agreement and then we've got the A201 which is the overall general conditions so the A201 is an interesting one.

It's this overall document that has lots of specific pieces of information that all the other documents reference to. So it's not actually a standalone contract. It's a general conditions. It's the overall lay of the land, all the definitions, all that kind of stuff. And the idea is that you don't wanna necessarily have all of that information in the specific contract 'cause it starts making that contract really big and unwieldy.

It's hard to manage which we'll see in just a second as we go through. So you take some of that information out so that everybody is using the same definitions, everybody is talking about the same way that the electricity is gonna get paid and things like that. All of those elements can get put into that general conditions and that leaves the contracts to be really specific to the contractual sets of information.

So the A101 owner-contractor, the B101 owner-architect, and then the A201 general conditions. There are hundreds of other contracts and there's lots of other versions of these contracts. There's the B104, the B107, all of those. They're all for different types of projects. My guess is for the exam purposes the B101 is really the one that you wanna know. It's the standard one for reasonably large projects. It's the go to one.

Same with the A101 for the contractor. It's that standard one even though there's a whole bunch of other ones. And some of those other ones are about size of project. Some of them are about how the fee will get paid. Is it lump sum? Is it hourly? Things like that so there's a whole wide array of these as different specifics. But if you get to know the A101, the B101, and the A201, you have a very good idea of the overall way that the contracts work.

So let's take a look. We'll start with the A101 and run through what that looks like and then we'll come back and look at some of the others.

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