2018 Architects Fees Marcus Beale B
2018 Architects Fees Marcus Beale B
2018 Architects Fees Marcus Beale B
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Architects’ Fees
A lecture given on 27 June 2018 at
University of Cambridge
Dept of Architecture
Professional Practice Course
Marcus Beale
MA, Dip Arch (Cantab) RIBA FRSA
Founding director of Marcus Beale Architects1
Contents
1. Introduction 2
4. Scope of service 5
6. Profit 8
7. Commercial aspects 8
8. Calculating fees 9
Percentage fees 11
Success Fees 13
Fee data 13
Expenses 13
1 http://www.marcus-beale.com
Fees - University of Cambridge - Architecture Part 3 - Lecture 1 - Marcus Beale - 27 June 2018 - page 2
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1. Introduction
Some context:
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The construction industry will always exist. It meets a genuine human need for
bridges, roads, buildings, and so on. Architects do not have a ‘right to exist’. We
take our place within the construction industry, and our role changes over time. We
have to redefine our role as the industry changes, and it changes markedly when
there is a recession. The tap is turned down; when it is turned up again, what
comes out of it is different.5
Ray and Charles Eames made a beautiful Venn diagram describing the economic
relationship between architect, client and society. Where the interests of the practice
coincide with the needs of the client and the wider needs of society is the ‘sweet spot’
where fee earning work resides, the ‘area of overlapping interest and concern that
the designer can work with conviction and enthusiasm’.
5 For example project managers emerged after the 1991 recession, and quantity surveyors in the
1930s - although their origins date back much earlier. These new construction professions
represent in general a fragmentation of the architect’s role.
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There are many ways an architect can be useful to society, ways that do not
necessarily involve a traditional building contract. The Eames office designed
furniture, fabrics, buildings and so on. Some architects design theatre, opera and film
sets, teach, write, paint or sculpt. Architecture includes exhibitions, shopfronts, urban
landscape, facade engineering, contract administration, technical performance
specification, and so on. We may do a bit of each during the course of our careers,
but some specialise in just one aspect and become highly expert at it. There are
many niches within the profession.
For what?
• Adding value to a site.
• Reducing risk in the construction process.
Adding Value:
Value in its deeper sense, not only cost, but also dignity, humanity, delight, cultural
significance.
If you add 20% of the value of the site, no client will quibble paying 1% more in fees.
If you reduce the value of a scheme, whatever you charge it is a waste of the client’s
money.
Reducing risk.
Construction is the largest cost for the client. Construction is expensive and risky.
The old fashioned rule of thumb for development was: 1/3 site value, 1/3 construction
cost, 1/3 profit.6
6As with architects’ fees, things have changed, profits are squeezed, but this is the order of
magnitude.
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Architectural practices employ architects to augment their resources of skill and time.
Salaries are the largest expenditure for the practice, also the greatest source of
wealth.
The aim in setting fees is to pay for adequate resources, to give yourself enough time
to do it properly, in a focused and efficient way. This means not working in a hurry.
When we are stressed we are not thinking clearly or creatively, we miss things and
make mistakes. Give yourself enough time to do the job well, and you will do it in less
time.
Keep records of time and refer to them when costing the next job.
4. Scope of service
What used to be called the normal, or full scope of architectural service, is to look
after a client from concept to completion, and then to inspect the work, a year into
use, and rectify latent defects. Thereafter to provide aftercare, in the form of being
available to answer any questions, provide copies of information if required, and so
on.
This concept of a full or normal service has become less universally applicable since
deregulation, and with the operation of a complex free market. The reasons for
diversity of service:
• Different forms of procurement
• Design and build
• Management contracting
• Construction management.
The minimum architect’s service might be to design a building, and get planning
permission, which is then sold onto a developer.
Until about 1990 there was a fairly well defined notion of what an architect does,
the so called ‘normal’ or ‘traditional’ service, from concept to completion:
• You tell the architect what you want, resulting in a brief from which
the project is:
• designed,
• consents obtained,
the building:
• detailed,
• specified,
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• tendered,
• constructed and snagged,
the architect acting as:
• contract administrator and
• team leader throughout.
Since then there has been a fragmentation of the role, so that the scope of service
is now a pick and mix. Some practices design a building up to planning and never
do working drawings, leaving the serious work to grown ups; others take the
design to key details only for a design and build contractor to take over; some do
the traditional service for most of the time.
The danger in fragmenting the role are that there are multiple responsibilities and
many possibilities for things to be missed.
Any calculation of architects fees must take account of what kind of service the
client needs, and this comes back to the amount of architects’ time required to do
the job.
In order to calculate a fee you must know what it costs you to provide the service:
that is: the costs of salaries and overheads. To this you add a suitable profit margin.
The reality is somewhat different: in general salaries are more than this and profits
are less.
When you look at company management accounts you can split a company’s
expenditure into two categories:
• Salaries of architects (and other fee earners)
• Everything else (salaries of support staff, National Insurance and pension
contributions, office rent, maintenance and administration, equipment, IT …)
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A worked example is at appendix A. The overhead factor will vary from practice to
practice, in this case the overhead cost is about 0.7 times salary, which is quite good.
So, in this example, to employ someone at a salary of x costs the company about
1.7x.
For example a newly qualified architect, on, say £40k p.a., must earn 1.7 x £40k =
£68k p.a. for the company to break even.
This can be expressed as a hourly rate by dividing the annual salary by the number
of chargeable hours worked.
The amount of hours you spend at work in a year is about 37.5 x 46 (52-6) = 1,725.
But is it reasonable to expect every work hour to be chargeable?
What about office meetings, CPD, non job-related admin, reviews, fee bids,
competitions, practice management, marketing, etc?
It is hard to determine how many chargeable hours an average architect works, not
least because some practices have a culture of long hours. So I have looked instead
at lawyers for a comparison. The average billable hours in top 10 lawyers firms in
London in 2017 were:
1,101 p.a. for equity partners,
1,437 for newly qualified lawyers, and
1,039 for trainees.7
Using these figures, we can expect a fee earning junior architect to work say 1,400
chargeable hours per year.
Having found the cost rate, you must then ascertain the charge out rate, by adding a
profit margin. It is normal to charge a third profit, making the charge out rate £48.57
x 1.5 = £72.85/hr.
Put in general terms, this equates to £1.82 per £1,000 of annual salary.
This is actually very close to the old RIBA guidance that ‘the hourly rate for technical
staff should not be less than 18 pence per £100 of gross annual income.’
You can work out the cost price for all the staff grades in a practice and get an idea of
how much it costs the practice to deploy each person.
7https://www.legalcheek.com/2017/10/billable-hours-nqs-work-harder-than-mega-earning-
partners/
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In the example below, option A is with an overhead factor of 1.7, example B with an
overhead factor of 2:
You can calculate time charge rates in different ways. You can ‘write off’ partners/
directors, so their time is considered an overhead. I don’t favour this. As a director, I
would like to be within the spreadsheet because I am, in reality, a fee earner.
6. Profit
There is no wrong answer unless it is less than zero. So set your ambition:
10 - 15 - 20 - 30 - 50 %? How much profit you make is up to you, in terms of how
much fee you charge, how efficiently you do the work, and what value you can
command in the marketplace.
Overall, for the practice as a whole, profit must be greater than zero or you go out of
business.
It is different when we look at individual jobs. Not every job makes a profit. Some
work is done deliberately for nothing (pro bono) as a community service, some fees
are adjusted downwards to suit a client’s circumstances or the long term commercial
interests of the practice. Some jobs go wrong and require a lot of time to put right.
Sometimes you simply get the fee wrong and have to swallow it.
Actual profit as a company is lower than the target profit for an individual job. You
might make 33% profit on your more profitable jobs. There will always be some jobs
that make more profit than others. If you target 35%, you might get 15% overall.
7. Commercial aspects
Choice
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A landscape contractor I respect once said we ask ourselves these three questions:
• Will we enjoy it?
• Is it good for our career/portfolio?
• Will it make money?
and we need 2 out of 3.
For example if you wish to move into new area, say into theatres, you might price this
differently than a core project.
Q2. Can we make a difference - is this something suited to our skills as a practice? Is
this a skill that everybody has or is the practice uniquely placed to provide success?
• They have to know you exist - obvious to you but not necessarily to others - what
marketing is for.
• You have to be good at your job.
• They smile when they think of you. [Empathy/being on the same wavelength/ being
fun to work with.]
I always suggest to clients, choose your architect first, and if you choose to work with
us, fees are not going to be a sticking point, we will be able to sort out an equitable
fee.
In formal competitions, there are often published criteria saying how the fee bids will
be assessed. It might be 50% cost, 25% technical experience, 15% methodology,
10% understanding of the brief.
8. Calculating fees
How are architects fees calculated? First I will look at how to estimate your fees,
second at how to present them.
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Top down.
In this way you can get a rough estimate of approximately what the correct fee
should be, as a percentage of the construction cost, or as a lump sum.
Is it like another job you have done already - if so what did that job cost to do?
What is different about this one? How much repetition is there? What are the
published guidelines on fees?
Bottom up
Bottom up one can assess the amount of resources needed for each stage of the
project, and add up the time and add for risk and profit.
Complexity of a job.
New build is easier, but the site itself may be complex, with changes of level, different
soil conditions, archeology, aquifers, buried services, proximity to other structures
and so on.
• Type of building
A simple project gets a lower fee than a complex project.
An operating theatre, a performance space, a museum or a private house will be
more complex than a car park, an agricultural shed or a warehouse.
• Size of project
A large project might involve substantial repetition, or it may involve many different
elements or building types.
• Type of client.
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An expert client gets a cheaper percentage fee than a private client, because the
architect has to spend more time consulting and communicating with an inexpert
client, taking them through the process for the first time.
An expert client with whom one has worked before needs far less management, and
this is reflected in the fee.
Scope of service.
We discussed above the variety of services provided by architects. The RIBA plan of
work was based on actual analysis of the time spent on projects, but this is changing.
Risks.
• Is the client an expert client or are you going to have to lead them through the
process for the first time?
• Have you worked with them before?
• Are there special circumstances, for example a ‘not to exceed’ budget?
• Are there physical unknowns, for example a delicate old structure in poor repair?
• Is there a lot of community involvement or resistance?
• Are there political difficulties, complex ownership structures or multiple consents
required?
There are three basic methods of fee calculation. The overall objective is to get
something that is fair and suits the forward planning for both client and architect.
Each is good for different things.
Percentage fees
Percentage is good for most projects. If the size and complexity of the project
increases, so does the time spent on it. Size and complexity correlate reasonably
accurately to cost.
The great advantage of a percentage fee is that you don’t have to keep renegotiating
fees during the project if the scope changes.
This is good for example if you do not know whether you are going to build 10 or 20
houses on a site. The advantage of agreeing a fee structure and implementing it,
rather than renegotiating it, is that you are not putting your own interests as a
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practice against your client. Once appointed you simply do what is best for your
client, as the agent [until the contract phase where if you are administering it you
must act impartially and protect both parties’ interests].
Since fee scales have been abolished, we can now reverse engineer, comparing
what we propose to the charge out rates of other practices. This information is
published from time to time by the RIBA or Architects Journal, an example below
from the AJ. Another source of information is the Fees Bureau,8 where for an annual
subscription you can look up ‘average’ fee based on the region, sector and size of a
job. Note this information is what other practices say they charge, not necessarily
what they do charge. And they are average fees, which may mask a wide variety in
actual bids.
In a time charge agreement the client pays for the time spent in delivering the
services. No more no less.
If the services are difficult to determine, this is a good way of making sure that the
architect gets a fair wage and the client pays for only what is actually done. It suits
some clients because they know they are paying only for actual services performed.
A good example is when you are agreeing to attend site during construction ‘as and
when needed’ rather than making regular inspections.
8 https://www.feesbureau.co.uk
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Clients should not be expected to undertake an open ended agreement, so these are
nearly always accompanied by an estimate of fees, perhaps a range, or a price ‘per
visit’ as appropriate.
Note that if there are changes to the budget, timetable or scope, or if the architect is
required to do extra work for reasons beyond the architect’s control, you are entitled
to additional fees.9
Lump Sum Fees are not ‘Fixed Fees’. Never agree to a fixed fee. A fixed fee does not
necessarily entitle you to extra fees if the scope changes. It is not a term recognised
in the RIBA appointment. If you are asked to provide a fixed fee reply by saying you
will be pleased to quote on a lump sum basis.
Also never agree to Fit for Purpose. Whose purpose? What if the supplier or the
manufacturer is at fault? Meet the requirements of the brief, yes. Exercise reasonable
skill and care: yes.
Success Fees
A new method of charging fees is to charge a success fee. Beware of success fees. In
normal circumstances when acting on behalf of an applicant or appellant, when you say
something, people understand that your fees are paid by your client, but you are
nevertheless expected to be objective. When paid a success fee you can never be a
credible witness at a public enquiry. You are incentivised to get a particular result so
cannot be considered objective.
MBA have very occasionally entered into success fee agreements [2 or 3 times out of 700
jobs] where our client does not have the money to fund the full planning fee. We ask them
to pay cost price and ‘double or quit’ on profit.
Fee data
If not, research:
Refer to the old RIBA fee scales (minus 20%)
Look at published scales or articles: AJ, RIBA, ACA.
Subscribe to the Fees Bureau.
Expenses
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Expenses are traditionally charged extra, at cost, or net cost plus a handling charge.
Sometimes they are amalgamated into the fee as an allowance of 2% or 5% of the
fee.
We favour the latter approach. In public sector work the former is prevalent, because
a lot of public sector work is aggressively cost driven.
Spell out the service. Make as long a list as necessary to show what is:
• included and
• excluded.
Stress what you will include, and how this relates to the individual project.
Spell out your expertise and track record to give you a competitive advantage.
Feedback
• Find out who else was in the running, what they bid, what their bids looked like,
why they were chosen.
• Explain to the client if necessary that your scope included services that others
excluded, etc.
• Feedback and coming second is good marketing. You can create a lot of goodwill
and this might get you onto the next short list.
Extra fees are chargeable under the RIBA form of appointment for:
• Additional work for reasons beyond the architects control [condition 5.9]
• Change of brief, timescale or budget [condition 5.8.1].
They are chargeable on a time basis, unless otherwise agreed, based on the amount
of time reasonably taken (not necessarily the actual amount of time taken).
It is best to flag up extra fees early, before they are incurred.
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Document time.
You must do this otherwise you don’t know how much resource is going on what.
There are various timekeeping softwares. These allow you to look into a job and click
into profitability, time spent, and so on, by work stage. But you must input the
information properly otherwise it is useless. Instil in staff the importance of good time
records.
Be businesslike.
If you are not careful about your own money, why should your clients trust you with
theirs?
Assertive means:
• set out clearly your interests, requirements and aspirations
• let others do the same,
• listen
• agree.
Aggressive means:
• Know your position and
• Ignore or trample over the needs of everyone else.
If you have agreed to the wrong terms, sometimes you must take it on the chin.
In which case you are doing good marketing and learning a lesson.
Communicate with people. Don’t suffer in silence. If you have taken on a project and
it is really much more complicated than you envisaged, why not pick up the phone
and discuss?
Find out what went wrong when things don’t go the way you expected: not to beat
yourself up, but to learn.
Remember everything you do is part of the practice’s persona, the outward image of
the practice as it presents itself to other people.
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1
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Appendix B - RIBA Indicative fee scales 1992. Note: construction costs have doubled since 1992.
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Appendix B2 - RIBA Indicative fee scales 1992 showing different complexities of projects.
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The top half sets out month by month fees to be earned for each job. The colour
coding represents where the project has got to: purple for feasibility, green for stages
2 and 3, bright green for technical design, and orange for operations on site.
The bottom half is fee earning capacity, the charge out rate (including profit) times the
chargeable hours per month.
Fee income
Project no Project name J F M A M J A S O N D TOTAL
107 Project name £2,207 £2,000 £9,500 £9,500 £9,500 £9,500 £42,207
106 Project name £12,301 £12,200 £12,200 £12,200 £15,500 £15,500 £15,500 £95,401
105 Project name £4,521 £6,250 £6,250 £6,250 £6,250 £3,000 £32,521
104 Project name £15,615 £15,500 £15,500 £15,500 £8,000 £8,000 £8,000 £86,115
103 Project name £10,522 £10,601 £10,500 £3,200 £3,200 £3,200 £3,200 £3,200 £3,200 £50,823
102 Project name £12,098 £5,250 £5,250 £5,250.00£5,250.00£5,250.00 £5,250 £5,250 £5,250 £54,098
101 Project name £3,036 £3,128 £3,000 £3,000 £3,000 £3,000 £3,000.00 £3,000 £3,000 £27,164
TOTAL £30,177 £43,852 £43,200 £49,700 £52,950 £51,450 £51,450 £43,200 £34,950 £31,950 £46,950 £479,829
Monthly cost £33,000 £35,000 £38,000 £41,000 £41,000 £41,000 £41,000 £41,000 £41,000 £41,000 £41,000
Profit/loss -£2,823 £8,852 £5,200 £8,700 £11,950 £10,450 £10,450 £2,200 -£6,050 -£9,050 £5,950
Cumulative -£2,823 £6,029 £11,229 £19,929 £31,879 £42,329 £52,779 £54,979 £48,929 £39,879 £45,829
Associate £11,667 £11,667 £11,667 £11,667 £11,667 £11,667 £11,667 £11,667 £11,667 £11,667 £11,667
Architect £10,500 £10,500 £10,500 £10,500 £10,500 £10,500 £10,500 £10,500 £10,500 £10,500 £10,500
Architect £10,500 £10,500 £10,500 £10,500 £10,500 £10,500.00
£10,500 £10,500 £10,500 £10,500
Assistant £7,583 £7,583 £7,583 £7,583 £7,583 £7,583 £7,583 £7,583 £7,583 £7,583 £7,583
TOTAL £40,750 £51,250 £51,250 £58,833 £58,833 £58,833 £58,833 £58,833 £58,833 £58,833 £58,833 £613,917
Capacity used 74% 86% 84% 84% 90% 87% 87% 73% 59% 90% 80% 78%