Its amazing how much a church needs to spend these days for a state-of-the art AVL system. As Mission Hills Church (“MHC”) got started looking at the costs to outfit its 117,000 SF new church facility, both my partner Tim Dreessen and I were shocked.
After much research and discussion, it was decided that MHC would hire Clair Brothers out of Manheim, Pennsylvania, to complete the design for a new AVL systems for the main santuary, the chapel, the youth area (of course), the children’s area (including the Early Learning Center) and the lobby (to name a few key areas).
The initial estimates were well north of $3 million, nearly $25/SF. This would equate to almost 20% of the proposed hard costs for the project. Outrageous!
But just today, I heard that another southeast Denver metro area church (not Cherry Hills) spent $3.2 million for all of its AVL installations and spent an eye-popping $23/SF including about $2M in its worship center which seats almost 2,000 persons.
Over the course of vetting and value engineering, MHC was able to get the proposed costs down to around $2.2 million ($18.80/SF). Now that the reality of the woeful financing markets have taken a hold and we have revised downward the budget for every system/item in the reduced new proposed building (100,000 SF), the overall budget is still $1.4 million ($14/SF).
While I don’t profess to being more than a music loving baby booming classic rock listener, I bet that what MHC gets for $1.4 million will be hands down compared to what they have now and certainly better than most churches of its size. Further, the design we will install will be scalable meaning, that when giving picks up sometime after the grand opening, MHC can add this gizmo and and that gadget to achieve the type of facility that will be few and far between in the greater Denver area.