Cohousing-L Mailing List: cost engineers

[IAN_HIG (IAN_HIG]

Cascade Cohousing used a quantity surveyor (cost engineer?) to do a costing
on our common house very early in our design process.  The cost estimate came
in hugely over our budget and still excluded anumber of important parts of the
building.  We were shocked.  But we soon realised that the cost engineer
had done any incredibly conservative estimate, any of the builders that we
subsequently used for our individual houses could have built the building
for well under the cost engineers estimate.  We did redeign the building
as a result of the cost engineers work to remove some expensive aspects
that had been identified and therefore we benefited from the exercise.  
However the actual costings them selves were not very useful as they assumed
the most expensive way of doing everything.

I guess all this experience means is that when selecting a cost engineer, 
like an architect you need to find one whoe works the way you want.

Ian Higginbottom
Cascade Cohousing
Tasmania