I am a recently licensed architect in Vancouver and I am getting my certificate of practice to start providing architectural services as a sole proprietor.
In all offices I worked for in the last 10 year, they treated architectural fees as a top secret matter and no one of the architects working on the projects really know what the amounts are, except the partners.
Recently, I have been reading heavily the Architectural Institute of British Columbia (AIBC) bulletins and guides for Tariff of Fees for Architectural Services. It mainly based on a percentage of the project probable construction cost of the project.
My issue is that I am approached by a developer wanting a six storeys multi-family residential building in a lot that needs to be rezoned and then have a development permit prior to the building permit. My response that I will work hourly until we reach an agreed upon general concept that works with the rezoning requirements, the off street parking we can accommodate in said site, along with the unit mix that works for them financially as well as other city requirements, then we will move to a fixed fee based on a percentage of the construction cost.
The client then asked what is my hourly rate, I said $135 an hour as this will be covering my over head expenses ( software , license, insurance, hydro, ..), salary and a profit margin (13%). The client was not happy and said as I am a newly licensed architect this is too high. However, I asked other architect friends who got their license recently and they said that it is similar to what they charge.
After that the client asked that I drop the hourly rate to $110 which means after taxes and overhead cost, I will be making less than what I was making in the office that I used to work for without sealing any drawings or taking liability. When I declined he asked for a fixed fee for the whole project from schematic to construction administration.
For the fixed fee I did some very rough calculations based on the site permitted coverage by the bylaw and the most likely gross area of the project and multiplied it by the average cost of construction per square foot for similar projects that I worked on in other offices and made my fees at 2.5% of this probable construction cost (based on the AIBC tariff of fees for 60 unit multi family, 6 storey building) with a limitation to one round of rezoning and development permit . However, the number that I came to also was rejected and the client asked for a much lower number.
My questions are as follows:
- Is my approach generally acceptable? - Can other architects with more experience in the forum chime in on their approach to fees setting for projects in general and multi-family residential in some detail?
$/hr projects never make money so we don’t ever use that formula when writing proposals. We only give out $/hr rates for extra services.
If 135 is your break even, which is really low, then figure out the time you expect to spend on the work then multiply it by the $/hr and add a cushion. That’s your fee. Don’t ever let the client negotiate the rate unless you’re also adjusting scope.
Not sure I agree about the hourly fee thing - so long as you're tracking hours, you should make a profit on every hour worked. Sadly I know that's theoretical, not always real life.
I would never recommend an hourly fee for a full project like this, but if we were helping with rezoning, it would be around the $20k-$25k range, on top of design fees.
$135 is substantially low for Vancouver, my old lower mainland office roughed out $150/hr for architects and around $200 to $225/hr for partners. $110/hr is less than even newbie Interns or decent technologists... Client's trying to short charge you for their own profit.
Agree with N.S.; if they still challenge you point to AIBC and CHOP's fee guides.
Non sequitur, Thank you for the insight.
A fixed fee is better also to avoid conflicts and having to defend every hour charged.
Can you give me an example how to set a fixed fee if a client approached you for a multifamily residential and no information regarding his construction budget? For instance, do you just do a rough calculation of the coverage anticipated and FAR based on the bylaws without drafting any plans to get anticipated gross area of the project and use that as an indication for your fixed fee?
Oct 20, 24 2:46 am ·
·
Non Sequitur
MA, on projects like yours, we find that clients prefer fees to be broken down per phase. This helps you as well because it sets milestones & deliverable goals and if the project stalls, you can easily bill up to the last completed phase. As to your project example, I find it hard to believe that this client does not know the size of the units/building other than 60 units at 6 storeys. In that case, we would first ask for a SD/DD phase fee based on 4k per week and maybe 10-15k for zoning and site plan work (could easily be more). That number gets the ball rolling and will allow you to narrow down scope before establishing fees for CD and CA phases/
We have plenty of projects to determine effort required and we likely would charge more on a green client thinking there will be more design revisions and client changes during DD. So it would look like 15k site plan & zoning then maybe 4 or 6 weeks design development at 20-30k. Then, you repeat the process for CD using the scope you determined in previous phase. 4 months to put together CDs? well, that's 100k min just for drawings. Any changes after DD phase is done triggers additional fees.
It could definitively be much higher if you need to do millwork and other finer details and, from my theoretical example above, 4 months CD is too short when you add consultant coordination and all the AHJ reqs.
FYI: 60units at 1200sq.ft average = 72,000sq.ft x 350$/sq.ft = 25million construction budget. I don't know what BC recommends for a %/construction costs on apartments but the RAIC has a free guide available. https://raic.org/node/24688
In some cases, your fee needs to be not ultra rigid so you can have a fee where there is a minimum fee with a GMP (guaranteed maximum price) for work within the contracted scope of work and basically what work that is covered (basically what the client is paying for) and then there is provisions in your contract for work that is billed as additional services or such that is billed in addition. You might consider something along those lines for some kinds of projects where you don't want to be too fixed by an immutable fee because of some variability associated so you are billing basically a price range for the given scope. If client wants more work beyond the scope, they pay an additional amount beyond the GMP amount. Or you may call it the Maximum Price for the given scope. Some clients wants a top dollar amount but a negotiated lower starting amount (minimum - as in "no less than" amount) that they may feel they are getting a good deal IF they don't waste your time and cause you more time to be spent. It is a way to address YOUR business bottom line needs as a business and allow for variables and still have a upper price point that you charge for the given scope that is within a reasonable scope of variability for same or similar scope. Part of the principle benefits of fixed fees. The client can budget and plan around the maximum price amount for "in-scope" and have to plan for paying more if they have "out of scope" work they want the architect/designer to do.
The minimum price you charge would have to be at least the lowest level you would accept to do for the given scope of work. If you are new, this may be something to work out for you because you are applying a price range model in case you overlook some incidental stuff that is still part of scope and would be seen as part of scope or so closely associated with the scope of work that you'd do it without it being billed as an "additional service". You may also not have a clear idea or data point to know really how much time it takes you to do the work. The quick & dirty method of calculating a fixed fee is "billed hourly rate x estimated number of hours with a pre-determined built in float". Where the Billed Hourly rate is [Direct labor rate + indirect labor rate costs per hour].... say salary + benefits divided by 2000 or 2080 hours a year for hourly rate and maybe round that to a hole dollar or round up to the next $5 dollar increment in price like $41 per hour rounds up to $45, then you multiply that by a multiplier to cover the sum of the Direct+Indirect Labor Rate plus the cost of business such as taxes, overhead, business costs, etc. divided by the same number of hours per year as the determined amount (rounded to the next $5 unit in increment)..... then you round up the sum of total of Direct+Indirect labor rate per hour + Cost of business per hour + you add a profit contribution margin (estimated profit you intend to make on the project... the actual may differ.... a healthy business will generally want a 35% contribution margin for profit at minimum but 20% is about minimum and more so add like 35%-50% to the sum of the DL/IL rate per hour + cost of business operations per hour, then round up to the next $5 unit of price or something like that. Consumers/Clients like easy numbers to calculate. The long hand method is basically a detailed cost to do the project and expenses of operating the business for the same share of the hours. If the project is multi-year like 2-3 years, you rate the business cost share to be borne by the project billing per the the project labor share over the project timeline's total possible hours of work based on a full-time work load. Say, if the project is 17 months then you can estimate the monthly labor around 167 (when estimating around 2000 hours a year) to 174 (when estimating around 2080 hours a year) hours a month give or take a little. You want to be be realistic. In the course of business, you will want to keep yourself busy where your average is at that level. Of course, if you have employees and such, you will need to do things on a more long hand detailed cost because you need to factors by adding up the costs associated with the project and some portion of overhead costs (cost of business) and spread that between projects going on and this gets more sophisticated with calculating hours. For a solo practice, the above works okay.
As a general rule of business, the cost of human resource labor (including indirect labor costs) should be between 15-20% of revenue. income taxes and such on businesses should be around 20%-35% (between federal/national taxes and your state/province/territory taxes, and some significant local taxes if applicable). Your cost of business expenses not covered in human resources. Remember in billed rate, only labor directly associated with the project is calculated in the "Direct/Indirect labor cost per hour". The other labor would be in the "overhead" but here in terms of percentage pie chart on costs + profit in relation to gross revenue, your overhead labor is grouped with the human resource cost and non-labor overhead costs of business (like business license fees, utilities, rent/leases, and misc. other expenses like paper, ink/toner, contracted IT services, etc.) this should be around 10-15% of gross revenue. Your profit (after the chunk on income taxes are taken out) should be around 25%-35%, at least and for growth. Maybe a little more if you want to grow as a business and build capital. If you are operating on only 15-20% net profit, you are floundering and business would be slow growth and there is also little capital built for lean times so you need that stronger profit percentages that is equal to or greater than your human resource per year in order to absorb down turns and major recessions and also build capitalization for growing the business which can be invested in scaled growth of human resources with growth in revenue stream and there would inherently be other potential scaled expenses that scales. More people... more ink, more paper, etc. You get the idea.
If human resources takes too big of a pie, cuts into profit. What is important is not all that "profit" goes into the pocket of the owners. Maybe some of it. Mainly in this profession, it would be equivalent to similar salary & benefits package of principals. The key, however, is that a sizable part of profits is retained earnings of the firm and stays with the firm.
In some cases, the firm principals are paid in such that they are categorized with the human resource cost so the art that is profit is mostly retained and what is disbursed to owners of the profits would be dividends or in case of LLCs, called distributions. In some cases, the LLC is configured to be taxed like a corporation versus pass through. This gets into this nitty gritty accounting stuff which can get boring but the idea is not all that profit is distributed out to the owners. Some of it is retained but in case of LLCs taxed as pass-through, they pay their share of taxes on the total of the revenue minus expenses. Remember that part on the taxes noted earlier, in pass-through, each member of an LLC pays their share of that taxes under their personal income taxes. However, from an accounting perspective, some percentage of that net profit doesn't actually leave the firm's bank account. Some may in a sense may call this a firm's leaders reinvesting some or all of their share of the net-profits back into the firm and that effectively becomes the "retained earning". The idea is you do not take away the life blood of the business. Greed is a good way to sabotage your own business's survival.
That's a bit more than your question asked. It is important to understand these other aspects of business. If you are going to have clients at all, you need to think and conduct your commercial activities here as a real business. Don't ever look at this as just a gig. It isn't. It's a BUSINESS.
I notice the AIBC part indicated Canada. So I did make some point from a dual U.S. & Canada point of view. Who knows, you maybe a Canadian architect and yet may be a building designer (not-licensed as an Architect) in Washington or some how get licensed there and in Washington.
With the above said, depending on how restricted you are to the tariff of fees or whatever, and whether you are allowed to set your own prices, the above maybe more useful in U.S. but if you are free to set your prices and those are more "guidelines" than mandatory, then you can perhaps figure out what you need to on that and meet your regulatory obligations.
Congratulations on spreading your architectural wings - Architecture & Planning has been idealized as an endeavor of creative passion when in fact it is a business enterprise with all those ethical, legal, and reporting responsibilities (the government is always your silent partner) - in business school they teach your first two employees are a knowledgeable business attorney and a CPA - this is part of your overhead and is incorporated into your A/E fees - consider this an investment because these two people will save you more money and trouble than they cost (and they are tax-deductible as you know) - the CPA will assist you in setting your fee schedule so you are profitable and the lawyer will provide and review enforceable contracts and agreements - if you have CPA-audited business records you can go to the bank for bridge funding so you always operate in the "black" and can also help with retained earnings (your business operating cushion) so you don't go bankrupt - jtk
Valuable advice! However, at this very early stage of zero clients, they are a substantial expense for me. I am trying to manage it for now until I get some revenue in then it will be a great investment to get a professional for financial and legal purposes.
I'm in a similar position for a 40 unit apartment building at the moment. Owner wanted a complete fee from schematic, through zoning and planning to building department. After some consideration, I split the proposal into a first few phases to get through the design, zoning and planning as a mostly fixed fee. The exception is meetings and presentations to what ever boards are needed these will be billed at an hourly rate of $250 per. Upon board approvals (assumed) I will seek proposals together from required consultants and provide another fixed fee proposal to get through CD's. When i write proposals I usually look at it in few different ways. 1) various percentage rates of cost of construction. 2) analysis, drawings required, and hours to make it all happen 3) drawing sheet count and a price per sheet. At some point all 3 methods start to synch and you can make a design about where you need to be. It's a bit like throwing a dart after doing wind speed calculations. Time is always the key factor. If you need to make say $150 a year then you need to earn $12.5 every month. It's not complicated. Years ago with similar questions about billing and fees- a good friend and Attorney in a high flying law firm explained to me - each attorney in the firm is responsible for 2000 hours a years. A brilliant explanation. 50 weeks at 40 hours and 2 weeks holiday. Good luck.
-a client asking you to lower it when its already low reeks of a potentially bad client
I don't like the idea of squeezing architects. I'd rather get a really good product and speed. It's almost always worth it unless I have the luxury of unlimited time.
Architectural fees methodology : Multi-family residential
Hi all,
Sorry in advance for the long post :)
I am a recently licensed architect in Vancouver and I am getting my certificate of practice to start providing architectural services as a sole proprietor.
In all offices I worked for in the last 10 year, they treated architectural fees as a top secret matter and no one of the architects working on the projects really know what the amounts are, except the partners.
Recently, I have been reading heavily the Architectural Institute of British Columbia (AIBC) bulletins and guides for Tariff of Fees for Architectural Services. It mainly based on a percentage of the project probable construction cost of the project.
My issue is that I am approached by a developer wanting a six storeys multi-family residential building in a lot that needs to be rezoned and then have a development permit prior to the building permit. My response that I will work hourly until we reach an agreed upon general concept that works with the rezoning requirements, the off street parking we can accommodate in said site, along with the unit mix that works for them financially as well as other city requirements, then we will move to a fixed fee based on a percentage of the construction cost.
The client then asked what is my hourly rate, I said $135 an hour as this will be covering my over head expenses ( software , license, insurance, hydro, ..), salary and a profit margin (13%). The client was not happy and said as I am a newly licensed architect this is too high. However, I asked other architect friends who got their license recently and they said that it is similar to what they charge.
After that the client asked that I drop the hourly rate to $110 which means after taxes and overhead cost, I will be making less than what I was making in the office that I used to work for without sealing any drawings or taking liability. When I declined he asked for a fixed fee for the whole project from schematic to construction administration.
For the fixed fee I did some very rough calculations based on the site permitted coverage by the bylaw and the most likely gross area of the project and multiplied it by the average cost of construction per square foot for similar projects that I worked on in other offices and made my fees at 2.5% of this probable construction cost (based on the AIBC tariff of fees for 60 unit multi family, 6 storey building) with a limitation to one round of rezoning and development permit . However, the number that I came to also was rejected and the client asked for a much lower number.
My questions are as follows:
- Is my approach generally acceptable?
- Can other architects with more experience in the forum chime in on their approach to fees setting for projects in general and multi-family residential in some detail?
$/hr projects never make money so we don’t ever use that formula when writing proposals. We only give out $/hr rates for extra services.
If 135 is your break even, which is really low, then figure out the time you expect to spend on the work then multiply it by the $/hr and add a cushion. That’s your fee. Don’t ever let the client negotiate the rate unless you’re also adjusting scope.
I use $150 as a benchmark, Ontario.
Not sure I agree about the hourly fee thing - so long as you're tracking hours, you should make a profit on every hour worked. Sadly I know that's theoretical, not always real life.
I would never recommend an hourly fee for a full project like this, but if we were helping with rezoning, it would be around the $20k-$25k range, on top of design fees.
$135 is substantially low for Vancouver, my old lower mainland office roughed out $150/hr for architects and around $200 to $225/hr for partners. $110/hr is less than even newbie Interns or decent technologists... Client's trying to short charge you for their own profit. Agree with N.S.; if they still challenge you point to AIBC and CHOP's fee guides.
Non sequitur,
Thank you for the insight. A fixed fee is better also to avoid conflicts and having to defend every hour charged.
Can you give me an example how to set a fixed fee if a client approached you for a multifamily residential and no information regarding his construction budget? For instance, do you just do a rough calculation of the coverage anticipated and FAR based on the bylaws without drafting any plans to get anticipated gross area of the project and use that as an indication for your fixed fee?
MA, on projects like yours, we find that clients prefer fees to be broken down per phase. This helps you as well because it sets milestones & deliverable goals and if the project stalls, you can easily bill up to the last completed phase. As to your project example, I find it hard to believe that this client does not know the size of the units/building other than 60 units at 6 storeys. In that case, we would first ask for a SD/DD phase fee based on 4k per week and maybe 10-15k for zoning and site plan work (could easily be more). That number gets the ball rolling and will allow you to narrow down scope before establishing fees for CD and CA phases/
We have plenty of projects to determine effort required and we likely would charge more on a green client thinking there will be more design revisions and client changes during DD. So it would look like 15k site plan & zoning then maybe 4 or 6 weeks design development at 20-30k. Then, you repeat the process for CD using the scope you determined in previous phase. 4 months to put together CDs? well, that's 100k min just for drawings. Any changes after DD phase is done triggers additional fees.
It could definitively be much higher if you need to do millwork and other finer details and, from my theoretical example above, 4 months CD is too short when you add consultant coordination and all the AHJ reqs.
FYI: 60units at 1200sq.ft average = 72,000sq.ft x 350$/sq.ft = 25million construction budget. I don't know what BC recommends for a %/construction costs on apartments but the RAIC has a free guide available. https://raic.org/node/24688
note my 4k/week is for one staff full time... adjust according to staffing expectations.
In some cases, your fee needs to be not ultra rigid so you can have a fee where there is a minimum fee with a GMP (guaranteed maximum price) for work within the contracted scope of work and basically what work that is covered (basically what the client is paying for) and then there is provisions in your contract for work that is billed as additional services or such that is billed in addition. You might consider something along those lines for some kinds of projects where you don't want to be too fixed by an immutable fee because of some variability associated so you are billing basically a price range for the given scope. If client wants more work beyond the scope, they pay an additional amount beyond the GMP amount. Or you may call it the Maximum Price for the given scope. Some clients wants a top dollar amount but a negotiated lower starting amount (minimum - as in "no less than" amount) that they may feel they are getting a good deal IF they don't waste your time and cause you more time to be spent. It is a way to address YOUR business bottom line needs as a business and allow for variables and still have a upper price point that you charge for the given scope that is within a reasonable scope of variability for same or similar scope. Part of the principle benefits of fixed fees. The client can budget and plan around the maximum price amount for "in-scope" and have to plan for paying more if they have "out of scope" work they want the architect/designer to do.
The minimum price you charge would have to be at least the lowest level you would accept to do for the given scope of work. If you are new, this may be something to work out for you because you are applying a price range model in case you overlook some incidental stuff that is still part of scope and would be seen as part of scope or so closely associated with the scope of work that you'd do it without it being billed as an "additional service". You may also not have a clear idea or data point to know really how much time it takes you to do the work. The quick & dirty method of calculating a fixed fee is "billed hourly rate x estimated number of hours with a pre-determined built in float". Where the Billed Hourly rate is [Direct labor rate + indirect labor rate costs per hour].... say salary + benefits divided by 2000 or 2080 hours a year for hourly rate and maybe round that to a hole dollar or round up to the next $5 dollar increment in price like $41 per hour rounds up to $45, then you multiply that by a multiplier to cover the sum of the Direct+Indirect Labor Rate plus the cost of business such as taxes, overhead, business costs, etc. divided by the same number of hours per year as the determined amount (rounded to the next $5 unit in increment)..... then you round up the sum of total of Direct+Indirect labor rate per hour + Cost of business per hour + you add a profit contribution margin (estimated profit you intend to make on the project... the actual may differ.... a healthy business will generally want a 35% contribution margin for profit at minimum but 20% is about minimum and more so add like 35%-50% to the sum of the DL/IL rate per hour + cost of business operations per hour, then round up to the next $5 unit of price or something like that. Consumers/Clients like easy numbers to calculate. The long hand method is basically a detailed cost to do the project and expenses of operating the business for the same share of the hours. If the project is multi-year like 2-3 years, you rate the business cost share to be borne by the project billing per the the project labor share over the project timeline's total possible hours of work based on a full-time work load. Say, if the project is 17 months then you can estimate the monthly labor around 167 (when estimating around 2000 hours a year) to 174 (when estimating around 2080 hours a year) hours a month give or take a little. You want to be be realistic. In the course of business, you will want to keep yourself busy where your average is at that level. Of course, if you have employees and such, you will need to do things on a more long hand detailed cost because you need to factors by adding up the costs associated with the project and some portion of overhead costs (cost of business) and spread that between projects going on and this gets more sophisticated with calculating hours. For a solo practice, the above works okay.
As a general rule of business, the cost of human resource labor (including indirect labor costs) should be between 15-20% of revenue. income taxes and such on businesses should be around 20%-35% (between federal/national taxes and your state/province/territory taxes, and some significant local taxes if applicable). Your cost of business expenses not covered in human resources. Remember in billed rate, only labor directly associated with the project is calculated in the "Direct/Indirect labor cost per hour". The other labor would be in the "overhead" but here in terms of percentage pie chart on costs + profit in relation to gross revenue, your overhead labor is grouped with the human resource cost and non-labor overhead costs of business (like business license fees, utilities, rent/leases, and misc. other expenses like paper, ink/toner, contracted IT services, etc.) this should be around 10-15% of gross revenue. Your profit (after the chunk on income taxes are taken out) should be around 25%-35%, at least and for growth. Maybe a little more if you want to grow as a business and build capital. If you are operating on only 15-20% net profit, you are floundering and business would be slow growth and there is also little capital built for lean times so you need that stronger profit percentages that is equal to or greater than your human resource per year in order to absorb down turns and major recessions and also build capitalization for growing the business which can be invested in scaled growth of human resources with growth in revenue stream and there would inherently be other potential scaled expenses that scales. More people... more ink, more paper, etc. You get the idea.
If human resources takes too big of a pie, cuts into profit. What is important is not all that "profit" goes into the pocket of the owners. Maybe some of it. Mainly in this profession, it would be equivalent to similar salary & benefits package of principals. The key, however, is that a sizable part of profits is retained earnings of the firm and stays with the firm.
In some cases, the firm principals are paid in such that they are categorized with the human resource cost so the art that is profit is mostly retained and what is disbursed to owners of the profits would be dividends or in case of LLCs, called distributions. In some cases, the LLC is configured to be taxed like a corporation versus pass through. This gets into this nitty gritty accounting stuff which can get boring but the idea is not all that profit is distributed out to the owners. Some of it is retained but in case of LLCs taxed as pass-through, they pay their share of taxes on the total of the revenue minus expenses. Remember that part on the taxes noted earlier, in pass-through, each member of an LLC pays their share of that taxes under their personal income taxes. However, from an accounting perspective, some percentage of that net profit doesn't actually leave the firm's bank account. Some may in a sense may call this a firm's leaders reinvesting some or all of their share of the net-profits back into the firm and that effectively becomes the "retained earning". The idea is you do not take away the life blood of the business. Greed is a good way to sabotage your own business's survival.
That's a bit more than your question asked. It is important to understand these other aspects of business. If you are going to have clients at all, you need to think and conduct your commercial activities here as a real business. Don't ever look at this as just a gig. It isn't. It's a BUSINESS.
I notice the AIBC part indicated Canada. So I did make some point from a dual U.S. & Canada point of view. Who knows, you maybe a Canadian architect and yet may be a building designer (not-licensed as an Architect) in Washington or some how get licensed there and in Washington.
With the above said, depending on how restricted you are to the tariff of fees or whatever, and whether you are allowed to set your own prices, the above maybe more useful in U.S. but if you are free to set your prices and those are more "guidelines" than mandatory, then you can perhaps figure out what you need to on that and meet your regulatory obligations.
Congratulations on spreading your architectural wings - Architecture & Planning has been idealized as an endeavor of creative passion when in fact it is a business enterprise with all those ethical, legal, and reporting responsibilities (the government is always your silent partner) - in business school they teach your first two employees are a knowledgeable business attorney and a CPA - this is part of your overhead and is incorporated into your A/E fees - consider this an investment because these two people will save you more money and trouble than they cost (and they are tax-deductible as you know) - the CPA will assist you in setting your fee schedule so you are profitable and the lawyer will provide and review enforceable contracts and agreements - if you have CPA-audited business records you can go to the bank for bridge funding so you always operate in the "black" and can also help with retained earnings (your business operating cushion) so you don't go bankrupt - jtk
Valuable advice! However, at this very early stage of zero clients, they are a substantial expense for me. I am trying to manage it for now until I get some revenue in then it will be a great investment to get a professional for financial and legal purposes.
I'm in a similar position for a 40 unit apartment building at the moment. Owner wanted a complete fee from schematic, through zoning and planning to building department. After some consideration, I split the proposal into a first few phases to get through the design, zoning and planning as a mostly fixed fee. The exception is meetings and presentations to what ever boards are needed these will be billed at an hourly rate of $250 per.
Upon board approvals (assumed) I will seek proposals together from required consultants and provide another fixed fee proposal to get through CD's.
When i write proposals I usually look at it in few different ways.
1) various percentage rates of cost of construction.
2) analysis, drawings required, and hours to make it all happen
3) drawing sheet count and a price per sheet.
At some point all 3 methods start to synch and you can make a design about where you need to be. It's a bit like throwing a dart after doing wind speed calculations.
Time is always the key factor. If you need to make say $150 a year then you need to earn $12.5 every month. It's not complicated. Years ago with similar questions about billing and fees- a good friend and Attorney in a high flying law firm explained to me - each attorney in the firm is responsible for 2000 hours a years. A brilliant explanation. 50 weeks at 40 hours and 2 weeks holiday.
Good luck.
I dont know your exact situation but
-your rate is a bit low at $135/ hr
-a client asking you to lower it when its already low reeks of a potentially bad client
I don't like the idea of squeezing architects. I'd rather get a really good product and speed. It's almost always worth it unless I have the luxury of unlimited time.
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