Category 01
Insights on cost planning
Budgets, elemental cost plans, contingency and the figures a board or a lender will test.
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...
Read 07 Aug 2025Professional 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.
Read 14 Dec 2023Cost 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.
Read 09 Nov 2023External 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.
Read 21 Jul 2022Inflation 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.
Read 16 Jun 2022Pricing 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.
Read 02 Jul 2020How 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...
Read 14 May 2020What 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...
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