Best Way to have Better Control and Fast-Track Your Project

If you are one of the many who are very concerned about control over how money is spent on your project and ensure proper spending, there is a way to do it. This decision however, must be made from the outset of your project and this requires you to have a licensed architect working with you, for you to reap the benefits of such a method of executing your project.

The traditional way of executing and delivering a project is through design-bid-build method where the designer or architect is a separate entity that provides the design and documentation only and a winning contractor from a bidding process to take up the construction contract. This method does not give you much of control over your project’s spending due to a separate contracting entity that will only be controlled with the terms of the contract, leaving the contractor to have more control over how to spend your money according only to agreed scope and specifications of the project.

Design-Build Method VS Traditional Design-Bid-Build Method; Project Pacing

The best method for your project if you want greater control and expedite the process of design and construction is that you must select an architect who has the capability of both designing and constructing your project and use the “design-build by administration” service of an architect. This type of service by an architect is a special type of project delivery method that only architects can provide the best outcomes. This way the client-architect collaboration replace the traditional method’s client-architect-contractor adversarial arrangement, where eliminating the third entity (contractor) made the process more simple.

To give you an idea of how this method could apply to you, let me share with you an example of one of my clients who opted for this type of service and how our arrangement was. My clients who were

How Much does Hiring an Architect Cost

"Price is what you Pay and Value is what you Get" ~ Warren Buffet

The fee that architects charge to their clients revolves around the value that they provide as a product for their professional services. The professional service of an architect is proportional to the complexity and risk of professional liability with a project.

The Professional Regulations Board of Architecture has prescribed in their memorandum for the published 2010 Standards for Professional Practice, a schedule of recommended professional fees according to project types, for example, for a residential project the recommended fee is set at 10% of the probable construction cost, however, while these are only recommended, architects are free to charge any amount that does not go far from what is recommended. Some highly reputable architects charge insane amounts of fees due to their reputation and quality of work and many beginning architects charge the lowest to the point of under-charging and hurting their businesses just to compete in price wars with lesser quality substitutes.

Many people are surprised to learn how high architects charge compared to engineers or other non-professionals (who are practicing architecture illegally under R.A.9266), they may go as far as to judge an architect as greedy and are way over their heads, this is because the very low fee or free service providers have far more inferior or non-existent service process compared to what architects provide from a project's start to it's finish. Engineers or non-architects do not value architectural design and charge as low as they can to secure the construction contract of your project, they let you do the designs on your own or get low-paid draftsmen and hide their fees on the construction part when you already have committed to handing them your money, either they sacrifice the quality of the work or underpay workers or both to profit from your project because they didn't charge for design and other preliminary requirements to get your project.