Meet Rami. He’s the Lead Project Manager here at Lion.

During his twenty one-year career Rami Alagha has worked on developments for companies around the world including the UK, Australia, Dubai, India, and Bangladesh, with a combined total construction price in excess of USD$600 million.

Rami’s career began in Dubai where he worked as a civil engineer, and then a project manager, on eight different high-rise construction projects, including the 250-room Shangri-La Hotel & a high-end finished high rise(Marina Mansions). Over the years, Rami would go on to work on a variety of different types of property development projects: residential, commercial, industrial, infrastructure, and subdivision works.

Throughout his career, Rami has kept up his formal academic training, completing a Bachelor’s Degree and a Master’s Degree in the United Kingdom, as well as a Diploma in Australia. Rami is also a Registered Building Practitioner and a member of the Engineers of Australia and working towards achieving a pHD in construction management from Curtin University, WA.

Q: What does being a project manager actually involve?
A: Lots of phone calls and meetings. Well, they’ve been replaced by Zoom calls now. There are a lot of people who work on a development, and most of them are third parties that we hire to work on the project. There’s architects, engineers, town planners, quantity surveyors, Council representatives, real estate agents,builders, and many, many more.

So it’s the job of a project manager to work with all of these people, keep them talking to one another, and make sure they get their work done.

There’s also quite a lot of staring at gantt charts and spreadsheets involved.

Q: You’ve worked on property development in a lot of countries—what’s unique about developing in Australia?
A: When I first started working in Australia I was definitely surprised by how strict the zoning laws are. Australia is geographically huge compared to other countries I’ve worked in, yet the Government is so strict about releasing new land.

But it’s also interesting to see what things are considered “normal” in different parts of the world when it comes to homes. Even differences within the same country. For example, I used to live in Perth, and over there it’s common to have a drain in the kitchen floor and bathroom flooring to make it easier to clean. But that’s not really done in Melbourne. That’s just one small example, but when you’re designing a home, there’s hundreds of these small decisions that are unique to the local market.

Queenslander-style homes are also an architectural style that’s quite new to me, so it’s been exciting to work on projects like Epoch and Zenith where we are preserving that unique style.

Q: What’s going on with the timber shortage? Is that affecting our projects?
A: Due to the 2019-2020 bushfire season, reduced manufacturing output due to COVID restrictions, and increased demand from the widespread adoption of the HomeBuilder program, there is a shortage of structural timber for homes which is affecting the entire industry.

There are a few ways we can work around these shortages. We are working with our construction funders to move up our loan drawdowns to facilitate up-front purchases of the timber required for our projects.

For some projects, we are swapping the timber out for steel. Normally, steel would be much more expensive, but with shortage prices there’s not much of a difference anymore.