What it costs to build here

Because the decision an owner actually has to make — whether to build at all — happens months before there is a drawing to price. At that moment the industry’s standard answer is “call us for a quote”, and there is nothing to quote against. A board does not approve “we will find out”. Publishing ranges with a stated basis costs us nothing we were not going to say in the first meeting, and it means the people who telephone are the people whose project is real.

Wide, deliberately, and the width is information. A warehouse shell between $145 and $245 a square foot is the honest spread between a simple pre-engineered building on a flat, balanced site with services at the property line, and the same building on expansive clay with a long utility run, a detention requirement and a higher finish standard. A narrower published number would be less true rather than more useful.

Because much of a building does not scale with floor area. One service entry, one fire riser, one entrance, one set of restrooms, one site connection — those cost roughly the same at 6,000 square feet as at 30,000. Divide them by a smaller area and the rate looks worse. It is arithmetic rather than inefficiency, and it is the single commonest way a per-foot figure misleads somebody.

Land, design fees where separately engaged, permit and plan review fees, utility tap fees, testing and special inspection, furniture and equipment, owner contingency and tax. Together those routinely add 20 to 40 per cent on top of the construction number, and on a site with heavy tap fees considerably more. There is a table of all of them below, because leaving them out is how a budget is wrong by a third before anybody has done anything wrong.

Four things, roughly in order. The soils, because an engineered foundation on expansive clay is a different building from a slab on grade. The site, because a long utility run, an unbalanced cut and fill, or a detention requirement are large and invisible from the building. The finish standard, because the gap between a functional interior and a brand-standard one is a multiple. And the schedule, because compressing one costs money in overtime and in sequence.

No, and the distinction matters. These are planning ranges for this class of work in this market, published so an owner can size a project before spending money on design. A bid or a guaranteed maximum price is a commitment against a defined scope, a set of drawings and a specification. If you need a commitment, you need one of those, and they come from documents rather than from a table.

In stages, and you see each one. A programming-stage order of magnitude from these published ranges. A schematic-stage budget with real quantities and real system selections. A design-development estimate with subcontractor pricing on the major trades. Then a guaranteed maximum price. At each stage we tell you whether the number is holding, and if it is not, you find out while there is still time to change something.

We tell you early, which is the only genuinely useful thing a builder can do about it. The options are always the same four — reduce the area, reduce the finish standard, phase the project, or find more money — and the time to choose between them is at schematic design, not at permit. A firm that lets a project reach a finished set before mentioning that the budget never worked has cost its client a year.