How to get the most of the money you spend on a QS – the Handover – Wisdom from Clare

Getting all the benefit from the transaction

When you have sent a job to our QS team, and paid for them to do a full take off (measure and price), you want to make sure you are getting all the benefit out of this transaction.

Each set of plans we price is gone over meticulously by the senior quantity surveyor and then peer checked, or reviewed, by a second senior QS.

Once it’s ready to go, the QS emails it to you for checking. Now we know that you are not available 24-7 to talk about pricing, so we let you give us a call at a time that suits, to ask any questions.

Only about half of our builders have this chat with the QS about the report.

But this is a lost opportunity for you as a builder.

This chat can be a valuable project management tool for you, as you can pick the professional pricer’s brains and understand exactly what they have allowed for and not in their pricing. You can still make adjustments to the pricing at this point if there is a variance in how you saw the job and how they saw it.

It’s part of the service

As you know, builders have a wealth of knowledge about what goes in to running a job, and no two builders will do it exactly the same way from end to end. So finalising the pricing with your QS is a great time to check that any particular ways you want things done have been allowed for in the pricing.

The QS is happy to change things to suit you, and each time you have these chats they get to know you better, take on your feedback and their next pricing you get them to do will be more and more lined up with how you like to operate.

You also need to understand that pricing exercise in enough detail that you can answer the homeowners’ questions and, if need be, their bank’s questions. So any lines or items or tags you are not 100% clear on can be covered in that chat with the QS to make sure you are all over the project and the pricing.

Now we do get it that time is a scarce resource, and we know how busy you guys are. We are also aware that often these pricing exercises are on a deadline and you are probably down to the wire for submitting it to the client.

But this handover chat is part of the service, you have already paid for it. You have nothing but benefits to be gained from making sure that you take the time!