Category 01
Insights on cost planning
Budgets, elemental cost plans, contingency and the figures a board or a lender will test.
What a cost plan must state on its face
Two cost plans can carry the same total and mean entirely different things. The difference is in what each one says it has left out.
When to appoint a quantity surveyor
By the time there are drawings worth measuring, the structural solution, the specification and the procurement route have all been chosen. Each moved...
Why a cost per square metre fails at tender
The rate that made the appraisal work is almost never the rate the scheme gets built at. Here is where the gap comes from, and how to close it before...
Benchmarking without copying the last scheme
Every early cost figure starts from something that was built before. The question is whether the differences were adjusted for, or whether the rate was...
Why refurbishment resists a rate
On new build, the thing you are pricing does not exist yet and is fully described. On refurbishment it exists and is not described at all.
Value engineering, and how it turns into cutting
The phrase describes two entirely different activities. One is design work that improves the scheme. The other is a list of things to take out because...
Professional fees and the costs outside the contract
A construction cost plan describes the building. An appraisal has to describe the development, and the difference between them is large.
Cost planning through RIBA stages 0 to 4
The same document reissued five times with better numbers is not cost planning. Each stage asks a different question.
External works, the line that breaks residential budgets
The building gets four cost plans and three design reviews. The land around it gets a lump sum and a hope.
Inflation allowances to the midpoint of construction
Inflation in a cost plan is not a percentage. It is a percentage attached to two dates, and the dates are the part that moves.
Pricing site abnormals before you buy the land
The building is the predictable part. What sits under it, around it and on the boundary is where land deals go wrong.
How to set a construction contingency that survives
Most contingencies are a percentage somebody inherited. That figure cannot be defended, cannot be released and tells a board nothing about what it is...
What an order of cost estimate should contain
It is the first figure a scheme produces and the one everything afterwards is measured against. Getting its contents right matters more than getting...