Pop-top fees?

[christo4robin]

What are you doing for pop-top fees? We have a fairly new practice, and this is the first time we're putting a pop-top proposal together.

% of construction?
$/sf?
fixed fee?

This one is about a 1,000 sf house that will get an 800 or so sf upper story.

Thanks for any thoughts, pros/cons, etc.

[gregcashen]

% of Construction for Design/Documentation

T&M for plancheck review

[PeterJ]

Is this an Athens based thread?

[J-G]

Greg just curious if you (or others) are willing to share. What is your range in % of construction? I have found that the figure is fairly consistent for larger residences, but small projects (with still a lot of detail) seem to have a higher percentage. I still can't get the designer to commit a percentage based fee, but it seems like it would be cleaner and more direct for the client. It also seems to put things in perspective since some real estate agents are taking 5% just for selling the house, and we rarely have a rate that goes much past five percent.

[gregcashen]

It's hard to say exactly. Almost always, the project changes and we end up incurring more costs and therefore generating more fees. Also, we do engineering as well as architecture, but we are usually around 6% before scope change and then we get additional fees for that on the T&M side. We always have the T&M clause in there for this reason. This is for residential only and is for a project with little interior finish work/details.
Also, because of where we are, we usually deal with 4-6 agencies for residential projects, so we have to do the plancheck and permitting on T&M.

[Wesley]

Here the fees (assuming involvement extends right through construction) tend to be higher. Residential work around 6-10% large projects vary from 2-5%. Obviously dependent on project value. So a house worth $300k will have a fee around 10% but a development worth $50 million will be more like 2%

Wes

PS> I assume T&M means time and materials?

[gregcashen]

Yes, you are correct.

As for fees, I am just pulling the design/documentation fees out and I realize we are low compared to other areas. Unfortunatley, in CA, increases in labor and building material costs have inflated the cost of construction so, while those prices have gone up, our fees have stayed the same, more or less. It simply does not make sense to our clients to charge them more for our services because plywood has quadrupled in the last year. We usually do a fixed fee on new residential with Time & Materials for certain aspects, such as permitting (docks, anything in the various reclamation districts, etc) and plancheck.