FAQs
- What should the customer know about your pricing (e.g., discounts, fees)?
Fees: Below are outlines of the two most common fee structures, flat & percentage of project cost. Many firms prefer a percentage of construction cost they assume to know the relationship between the service hours required and the cost tobuild. The advantage here is a complete fee structure can be proposed before "pencil hits paper". The problem for the Client-Architect relationship is our interest diverge. The better we are at reducing the project cost (for a given scope of work) the lower the professional fee. In other words if we knock ourselves out to come up with a less expensive way to do something we get paid less. Flat fees have the advantage of letting the Client know the Architect's fee up front however the extent of the project work (scope) and services needs to be delineated accurately in order to set a fee fair to both Client and Architect. Typically I recommend a Pricing Set as described above. If used the Pricing Set contract includes an estimate of the fee for complete services subject to changes in the project scope requested by the Client.