A planning consent you cannot afford to build is the most expensive thing a developer can own

The order in which advice gets commissioned is largely a matter of habit. It is also, on a surprising number of schemes, the difference between a site that works and a site that sits.

A familiar sequence. Land is bought or optioned. An architect is appointed and a scheme is designed. Planning is applied for, argued over and eventually granted. And then, with a consent in hand and a funder to satisfy, somebody asks a quantity surveyor what it will cost to build.

That is the first point in the process at which anyone has tested the central assumption, and it is roughly eighteen months and a substantial fee too late.

What the sequence costs when it goes wrong

When the number comes back higher than the appraisal assumed, there are four options and none of them is good. Redesign and go back to planning. Value engineer, which at that stage means removing things that secured the consent. Sell the consent to someone with a lower cost base. Or hold the site and wait for values to catch up, which is the one most people choose because it requires no decision.

The cost of the wait is rarely written down. Finance on the land, professional fees already spent, and a consent with a clock on it.

What an early estimate actually buys

A feasibility is not a cost plan and does not pretend to be one. It is a considered view, from a chartered quantity surveyor, of what a scheme of that type, in that location, at that specification, is likely to cost to build. It takes the architect's drawings and accommodation schedule, and it comes back inside a week.

It does not tell you the answer to three decimal places. It tells you whether you are in the right postcode, and it does so while a redesign is still a conversation rather than a planning application.

The honest version

Not every scheme needs an estimate at Stage 0. A developer building the same house type they have built forty times does not need us to tell them what it costs. The schemes where early advice pays for itself are the ones with something unfamiliar in them: a conversion, a constrained site, an unusual structure, a specification driven by planning rather than by the buyer.

If that describes what you are looking at, the estimate costs a fraction of the fees already committed to the scheme, and it arrives at the only point where the answer can still change anything.

What this means for your scheme

• Get a cost view before the design is fixed, not after consent.

• What we need to start is the architect's drawings and the accommodation schedule.

• Turnaround is up to a week from receipt of the final design information and agreement of the fee.

• If the scheme is a repeat of something you have built before, you probably do not need us yet. We will say so.

What we need from you

• The architect's drawings, at whatever stage they have reached.

• The accommodation schedule: unit numbers, unit types and areas.

Send these to mark@qsetc.uk and we will tell you which estimate suits the stage you are at.

---

Sources. Comment piece. No external sources.