Residential cost plans and NRM2 take-offs.
We measure each unit type once to NRM2 and price the site works and the obligations separately. A plot rate hides both, so the ground and the consent turn up as cost at tender rather than before it.
What we deliver
- —NRM2 bill of quantities as an Excel workbook, with the measurement behind every line and the marked up PDFs it came from
- —A cost plan in NRM order, mapped to your own or your client's pricing document, with cost, mark up, sell and profit broken down on every line
- —Options, exclusions, provisional sums and value engineering, each scheduled on its own line
- —Trade tender packages in eight numbered sections as standard, populated as appropriate: scope of works, pricing document, drawings, specifications, programme, prelims, health and safety, contract
- —Enquiry lists, invitations and a tracker, returns chased, and every quote levelled onto one baseline with the gaps and exclusions clarified
- —Later stage cost plan updates, and the option to take the whole tender stage as a single Tender Win Pack
What we watch for
- —The 11m line moves the specification. Past 11m, sprinklers are required and balcony materials go to limited combustibility. Height is measured to the floor of the top storey, not the roof, so a scheme can cross it unnoticed.
- —Shading is a cost, modelling is a fee. South-facing glazing can fail the simplified overheating check, so you buy shading or dynamic thermal modelling to prove it passes. One is a build cost, the other a fee and programme time.
- —Party wall awards start before the works do. On a constrained site, surveyors' fees, awards and monitoring land before you break ground and sit outside the works cost. A basement or underpinning widens the list of affected owners.
- —What is not opened up gets priced twice. A conversion is priced against a structure nobody has opened up. Intrusive survey, asbestos, floor capacity and existing services move the number, and they move it after tender if not bought before.
Residential preconstruction, answered
How do you price a scheme with many similar units?
We measure each unit type once to NRM2 and apply it against the accommodation schedule, so the work is proportionate to the number of distinct types rather than the number of units. A correction is made once and flows through every instance. What cannot sit in a unit rate is measured separately: cores and circulation, communal areas, plant, the roof and podium, external works, and anything that varies by position or orientation.
When does a residential scheme become a higher-risk building?
At least 18m tall or at least seven storeys, with at least two residential units. It matters commercially because building control approval becomes a hard stop: no work starts until the Building Safety Regulator grants it. The statutory determination period is twelve weeks for a new building, but it only runs from a valid application and can be extended by agreement, so what belongs in the programme is the elapsed time, not the statutory minimum. That wait is a preliminaries cost.
What do you need to start a residential cost plan?
A drawing set, an accommodation schedule and whatever specification exists, even partial. Then the documents that carry the abnormals: the planning permission and its conditions, any section 106 agreement, the CIL liability notice, the ground investigation and the survey. On a conversion we ask for a refurbishment and demolition asbestos survey, not a management survey, because only the first is intrusive enough to price from. The abnormals usually decide whether the scheme works.
Not the question you had?
Send us the drawings and the return date. We will tell you what we would need and what we would give you back, before anyone commits to anything.
Let's discuss your project.
Tell us about your tender or project and we'll show you exactly how we can help you win it, and deliver it.