Service 08
The number, and what it means for the decision in front of you
A client side quantity surveyor is the surveyor appointed by you rather than by the contractor. The measurement is the same discipline either way.
What differs is who the answer is for, and whether anybody tells you what the answer means before you commit to it.
Elemental cost plans to NRM1
Bills of quantities to NRM2
Tender analysis and normalisation
Interim valuations and certificates
Variation assessment and change control
Final account negotiation and settlement
The problem
A measured number is not the same as commercial advice.
Most developers who have been disappointed by a quantity surveyor were not let down by the arithmetic. They were given a figure and left to work out for themselves what it meant.
Measurement is a technical discipline with published standards behind it, and it is done to a consistent quality by most of the profession. That is precisely why it is the wrong thing to buy on its own. Two surveyors measuring the same drawings will produce broadly the same quantities. What separates them is whether anybody tells you which of the assumptions behind those quantities is fragile, what happens to the figure if the ground turns out differently, and whether the decision you are about to take is the right one at all.
None of this is incompetence. Measurement is done to a consistent standard across the profession and the people doing it are competent. What is missing is the second half of the job, which is telling you what the figure means for the decision in front of you. That half is not a deliverable, it does not appear on a fee proposal, and it is the part that changes outcomes. Three versions of the same gap turn up repeatedly, and all three are visible long before they become expensive.
A cost plan arrives as a spreadsheet with a total at the bottom and no statement of what it excludes. A tender report ranks four bids by price without normalising the qualifications that make them incomparable. The developer is left holding a figure they cannot interrogate.
A surveyor brought in to measure a finished design is pricing choices made months earlier, when they could still have been changed cheaply. By then the structural solution is fixed, the specification is written and the procurement route is chosen. Each moved more cost than the measurement will.
A monthly document stating a certified figure, a forecast and a variance, with no view on which number is soft or what would close it. It describes the past accurately and helps with nothing. What is needed is shorter and more awkward: what moved, what will move, what decision is due.
The difference
Five decisions taken before anybody opens a measurement package. Each moves more money than any rate in a bill of quantities, and none of them is a measurement question.
Two frames reach the same floor area and both price correctly. Which carries programme risk, which depends on a single supplier, and what the difference in duration does to finance cost across eighteen months appears in neither set of quantities.
Single stage or two stage, both legitimate, measurement identical. What changes is where the competition sits and how much of the price is genuinely fixed at the point you are committed.
A round percentage looks prudent and tells you nothing. Built against identified events, each with a value and a release trigger, it can be spent deliberately and defended to a funder line by line.
A paragraph moving ground risk back to the employer is English, not a number. It appears in no measured quantity and is frequently the most expensive item in the document.
Defined means the contractor has priced its effect on programme and preliminaries. Undefined means they have not, and both follow later. The two look identical in a total and behave very differently once instructed.
A contract sum supported by three lump sums leaves nothing to value a change against. The breakdown you specify before tenders go out decides how every variation for the next two years gets priced.
None of this needs unusual technical skill. It needs an appointment whose purpose is to give you an opinion rather than to produce a document, and somebody with no commercial reason to keep that opinion comfortable.
What we do
An independent quantity surveyor who gives you the opinion as well as the figure. The measurement is the foundation. The advice is the product.
The industry label for this appointment is the professional quantity surveyor, usually shortened to PQS, meaning the surveyor engaged by the client rather than by the builder. We will use plain terms from here, because the label describes who signs the fee note and tells you nothing about what you receive.
Quantities to NRM1 at cost planning stage and to NRM2 where a bill is required, so figures trace to a standard. Set out on our cost planning and take-off pages.
Exclusions and assumptions on the face of the document rather than in an appendix. Where an assumption is doing a lot of work we say so, and what would establish it. Where a figure is not safe to commit against, we say that too.
Valuations made against work genuinely in place. Variation assessment tests entitlement before value, because answering both together is how a change becomes a claim.
A board paper and a funder’s drawdown pack ask different questions of the same figures. A position certified properly each month survives examination by a lender’s monitoring surveyor without argument.
Final account negotiation starts from a record built during the job rather than reconstructed afterwards. Where it will not settle it moves to final account dispute review with the evidence already in order.
No design fees and no software licences to sell. One party per project only, never two sides of the same build. One senior lead from first budget to final account.
What we produce
What a construction cost consultant for developers should be able to hand over. Each is written to go to a board, a lender or a joint venture partner without a covering explanation.
An elemental cost plan that develops with the design and is reissued at each stage with a reconciliation showing what changed, why, and whether it was design development or scope creep. The exclusions and assumptions are stated on the face of the document, because a number without them is not advice.
Measured quantities a contractor can price and cannot later reinterpret. Where the design is incomplete, the gaps are identified and filled deliberately rather than quietly, and each assumption is recorded so it can be tested when the drawings catch up.
Bids normalised to a common basis so the comparison is genuine, with qualifications and exclusions pulled out and priced rather than left in the appendices. The cheapest tender and the lowest out-turn cost are frequently different bids.
Monthly valuation of work genuinely in place, with the report stating the forecast out-turn, the changes assessed and the items still open. Valuing against an application rather than against the works is the most common way a project overpays quietly for two years.
Each change valued under the contract, with the entitlement tested before the value is discussed. Granting an extension of time and agreeing to pay for it are two separate decisions, and merging them is expensive.
The account assembled, tested and settled, with changes reconciled against what was instructed and what was built. Where it will not settle, the record is already built well enough to argue from.
Why developers call
A figure taken from a previous scheme, carried into an appraisal, then repeated in board papers until it became the number everybody believed. Nobody wrote down what it excluded. Our hidden cost exposure scenario deals with what surfaces when that figure is finally tested against measured scope.
The contractor's quantities were accepted because checking them looked like duplication, and because everybody assumed somebody else had. The consequence appears at remeasurement or at final account, by which point the works are built. This is the subject of our quantity assumption risk scenario.
Four returns, one clearly cheapest, and a set of qualifications in the back of it that moved risk back onto the employer without anybody pricing the transfer. Normalising the bids turns four different documents into one comparison, and it usually changes the ranking. Where the documents themselves created the opening, our tender documentation gaps scenario applies.
Most of this work sits on housing, apartment and mixed use schemes. If that is your territory, the residential development page describes how the commercial position usually runs, and the borrower side page sets out how we work with developers and private investors specifically.
Two things, and the second is the one that matters. The first is measurement and valuation: building the cost plan, measuring the works, testing tenders, valuing what has been built and settling the account. The second is telling you what those numbers mean for the decision in front of you, which is where the exposure sits and what would have to be true for the figure to hold. A surveyor who only does the first is doing arithmetic on decisions you have already taken.
No, and the distinction is worth being blunt about. Both use the same measurement standards and both are competent professionals. The difference is who they are paid by and what they are paid to achieve. The contractor's surveyor is there to maximise and defend the contractor's account, which is a legitimate job. An independent quantity surveyor acting for you is there to test it. Every valuation has both sides present, and if only one of them is represented the outcome is predictable.
Yes, and arguably more than on a traditional contract, because on design and build the consultants who wrote your specification are usually novated across to work for the contractor. Where the appointment also carries authority to instruct and certify, the role is called the employer's agent, and we set that out on our employer's agent page. The measurement discipline is the same either way. What changes is the authority: without being named in the contract, a surveyor can advise you but cannot instruct, certify or bind anybody, and the contractor is entitled to treat their view as an opinion rather than a decision.
The threshold is complexity rather than value. A straightforward scheme at several million pounds may need less commercial attention than a phased refurbishment at a fraction of that, where the unknowns sit behind existing fabric and the contract has to allocate them. If the commercial position is simple, we will say so rather than propose a fee against it. What raises the threshold is anything that makes the scope hard to describe: existing fabric, phased handovers, a live building, a specification driven by an end user who has not signed yet, or a procurement route that fixes the price before the design supports it.
Full lifecycle appointments are usually a percentage of construction value. Defined pieces of work, for example a cost plan at feasibility or a tender analysis, are quoted as a fixed sum. Fees for construction claims and dispute advisory services are agreed individually following an assessment of the scope, complexity and documentation involved. The basis is agreed and written down before anything begins, with the exclusions stated rather than left to be discovered. Where a scheme runs materially longer than the programme the fee was priced against, we raise it at the time and agree the position, rather than presenting it afterwards as an additional account.
Yes, and a good part of the work arrives that way. The first exercise is establishing where the position actually stands, which is rarely where the last report said it stood: what has been certified, what has been instructed but not valued, what has been claimed and what is genuinely still open. That reconciliation is uncomfortable to read and it is the only honest starting point. We would rather deliver that in the first fortnight than issue a comfortable report that agrees with the previous one and defers the problem to the final account, where it costs considerably more to resolve.
Related
The figure that goes into an appraisal, built from measured scope rather than a rate.
The same discipline with contractual authority to instruct and certify.
Measurement a contractor can price and cannot later reinterpret.
The same work, priced for a city site.
Insights
Two provisional sums of identical value can have entirely different consequences, and the difference is a single word in the bill.
Read the article
By the time there are drawings to measure, the structural solution, the specification and the procurement route are already chosen.
Read the article
Two cost plans can carry the same total and mean entirely different things. The difference is what each says it has left out.
Read the article