- Approximate cost of services:
- $65,000.00
- What could this company do to improve their services?
- Any advice to offer fellow homeowners facing a similar project?
General Contracting and Project Management
At South Park Design Build one of our primary goals is to have transparency with respect to communication and costing of projects. To that end we strive to supply any of our clients with extremely detailed costing documentation. As part of the initial planning stage of any project we offer 1. Interior designer 2. draftsman to do structural plans including engineers approvals and permit acquisition 3. A line by line item detailed pricing for proposed plans typically a 10-12 page document detailing every conceivable expense on any given project. This document also typically includes the backup trade quotes to validate our Estimate. This is one level of transparency, all quotes that come into our office are provided to the client as part of their pricing package, It is not industry standard to show clients this information. In this particular case the clients agreed to pay for the items detailed above and were supplied with interior designers detailed plans including several differing layouts, structural plans drafted and stamped by an engineer, and given a city stamped set of drawings with the construction permit, as well as our costing package. These are the items that were covered in the initial deposit. above and beyond that there were some 50+ hours spent in assembling our costing package as well as meeting and discussion with various city officials including fire marshal to investigate options for a legal rental unit and access challenges for first responders.
Our goal is always to provide our clients with a realistic costing of their proposed plans. Sometime the end costing isn't what the client wants to hear, but we know it to be realistic for what's been proposed in the initial planning stage. We make every effort to include a full scope of costing at the onset of a project so that a client knows up front what to expect. One of the most common complaints we hear about contractors is that the client was "told what they wanted to hear" that a project could be completed for a certain price, then once the house is under construction the realistic costs become apparent.
We are happy to hear that a suitable contractor was found to do the work to the clients needs. I would be interested to see how closely the end result matches the initial "blue sky" list of wishes we were given to work with.
South Park Design Build