Residential Pricing
Residential Pricing
(OP)
Pricing is always a hot topic and has been brought up a lot the last few days so figured it's easiest to start a separate thread.
What kind of pricing do people see/charge in their area these days for residential projects? IMO a lot of people here are underselling their work.
As I said in the other thread I'm usually $500 minimum for a site visit, $700-$900 total for a SV + report/simple drawing.
For a new pile/foundation only plan, $2k-$4k. For a new big house, I'd say full structural markups $7k-10k, with drafting $9k-$12k.
Overall I try to stay around $200/hr.
What kind of pricing do people see/charge in their area these days for residential projects? IMO a lot of people here are underselling their work.
As I said in the other thread I'm usually $500 minimum for a site visit, $700-$900 total for a SV + report/simple drawing.
For a new pile/foundation only plan, $2k-$4k. For a new big house, I'd say full structural markups $7k-10k, with drafting $9k-$12k.
Overall I try to stay around $200/hr.
RE: Residential Pricing
Houses I price like a commercial project. Estimated construction cost × 6% × 12-15%. Additional multipliers for complex arrangements, oceanfront, and PIA architect or contractor. (PIA Architect is rare since I usually just refuse to work with them. ) High end custom homes in the area are between $300 and $350 per square foot. So that's about $2-$2.30 per square foot with a floor of about $6,000.
RE: Residential Pricing
RE: Residential Pricing
For design work, I generally don't base anything on hours or hourly rates. I figure it's a meaningless metric most of the time because at the end of the day, we can only charge whatever the market will accept based on supply and demand. If I look at a garage and figure it will take me 30 hours to design at $150 and hour = $4,500, but the most anybody will pay in the surrounding area for a garage design is $300, well I guess that's all I can charge. On the other hand, if the going rate is $6,000, I'd rather charge that than the $4,500. Knowing the number of hours a job will take is still obviously useful in terms of estimating the project timeline and assessing overall productivity, but I don't like to use if for pricing.
RE: Residential Pricing
I use the hourly rate to make sure I'm in the ballpark and not going to get killed on a job. For the big houses, that's the worst $/hour rate generally since they always take a lot of time. But if I can get more $/hr spent on another job because that's the market rate, sign me up for sure.
$2 per sq foot is a pretty common number I've heard from other people and that's about what I like to shoot for as well.
RE: Residential Pricing
For houses its what the market can bear. Generally 2K-3K for 2500sf-4000sf. I try not to provide much drafting, if adding drawings, usually tack on 500-750$ for each drawing I think I need.
Its really hard to gauge. Some jobs do fine with, some I loose out on because Im priced too high, even when I think I am low.
RE: Residential Pricing
I also try to be careful about clients that try to pull paid-if-paid nonsense on me. Their fees go up a lot.
RE: Residential Pricing
RE: Residential Pricing
My standard response to that is "I'm sorry, but engineers don't work on spec. You might eventually find someone, but it won't be us."
RE: Residential Pricing
I use an iPad app called FastFields to generate my reports (it emails me an MS Word document) before I leave the property. It gets me to 95% completion. When I get back to the office, I hit submit, open the word document, and spend maybe 20 minutes refining it and doing a sketch. Also helps having a library of ready-to-modify sketches, product cut sheets, and repair procedures. I track an Effective Rate from time spent on hard-number assessments, and with my tools, I'm right around $180-$220.
I don't see your numbers being too high. Clients tell me all the time "We had another engineer quote us $2,000 just for looking at this." I think there are firms out there that - when busy - will throw a tall number out there and see if they bite. I know one guy that needed a bore log - just a bore log, not a full report - and the geotech firm charged him $9,000 for it.
RE: Residential Pricing
RE: Residential Pricing
New large multimillion dollar homes in the mountain are 15K+
Typical new houses are $7k+
Small addition are usually $3k+
I do my own drafting.
RE: Residential Pricing
The letter-form reports I do are a terrible time sink and I need to move away from them or up my prices. StructPathologist is the 2nd engineer/firm I've heard of that have a standard inspection form as a deliverable. I am desperate to get my hands on one of these standard inspection forms because 1) apparently this works quite well and residential clients really appreciate their low cost and apparent effectiveness and 2) I cannot figure out how I could possibly standardize residential inspection deliverables into a single boilerplate form when their purpose and scope varies so significantly. Obviously it works so well you're charging pennies on the dollar compared to others, but I have no idea what it would look like.
RE: Residential Pricing
How do you figure out the sq. ft? For example, 1 story house with crawlspace vs 1 story house with slab on grade. How about exterior space around the house with roof over it?
RE: Residential Pricing
I was trying to imagine this, too. It seems you'd either need different forms for different complaints, or one generic one.
The generic one might have a project and inspection information section with address, time, date, weather, inspector, etc., and then an 'observations' section which is just a series of photographs with captions you enter in the field. Then, there's an 'opinion' section that you fill out at your desk. Just a couple quick paragraphs, if that much, tying the various photos to what you think is going on. Then a 'recommendations' section. This would rely on what StrucPatholgst was referring to with the standard details, repair procedures, and cut sheets. Just drop them in and produce the report.
Depends on the house. I'll sometimes bump up the price by a few hours worth of time to account for framing layout in a crawlspace, but for a simple layout I don't usually differentiate. The slab layout can be as much work sometimes, especially if the architect wants to get cute with some sort of innovative insulation scheme. People are moving away from crawl spaces in this area since nobody maintains them and they turn into giant, house sized petri dishes.
Indoor vs outdoor - again, depends, but I usually don't make the distinction. To properly design a large screen porch roof hanging 20' off the back of the house usually takes more engineering than twice as much interior space, but doesn't cost quite as much to build. It usually averages out.
Fee writing an imprecise science, to be sure, but this is the most expedient way I've found. Otherwise, I spend 2 hours wringing my hands wondering if I've charged enough, or too little, or too much, or why am I doing this it all I should have just stayed at the old firm...ahhhh!!! Okay...maybe not so dramatic...but the less I have to think about it the better off I am.
RE: Residential Pricing
RE: Residential Pricing
Yes. I used to discount it - one price for conditioned space, one price for garage, one price for unconditioned living, etc. But it was a mess, and I was growing more precise while losing accuracy. So I decided to just total up square footage that has either a structural floor under it or a roof over it.
RE: Residential Pricing
DoubleStud: In terms of what to use for square footage when using that to establish a fee, I'll typically count any floor surface towards the square footage, except that for a full basement, I'll maybe use half the basement area, and for a crawl space maybe even less. Per your example, for a "1 story house with crawlspace vs 1 story house with slab on grade", I would use the 1st floor square footage for the slab on grade option and somewhere in the range of 1 to 1.5 that for the crawl space option. For "exterior space around the house with roof over it", I'd include that area in the overall square footage. The method isn't perfect but gives some idea of where to start. I'll use this in conjunction with looking at past fees for similar projects (if that data exists).
RE: Residential Pricing
I've only been pricing out jobs for a year now and most of them $2k or less so those are much easier to figure out.
Ideally I get more commercial work as time goes on because I don't want to be stuck doing only residential (although easier to get when starting out). But hey, if there's a market for it and no one else wants to do it, I'll fill that void.
Pricing jobs in a square footage basis is something I'd really like to get better at as well so great info above. Around here most new projects are on piles so that framing is certainly something I don't want to discount too much. I like the idea of 1.5x multiplier for lesser involved floors.
RE: Residential Pricing