Quantity Surveying & Estimating · Nationwide · Virtual
A Quantity Surveyor for Housebuilders.
From the land appraisal that wins you the site, to the final account that keeps the margin you priced. Ad hoc, by the job or by the hour, no contract, no payroll, and nothing for your site managers to learn.
From £35 / Hour
Every service on the list, billed by the hour from a single hour. No retainer, no minimum spend.
No Commitment
Use us for one tender or every job. Nothing to sign, nothing to cancel, nobody on your payroll.
Nationwide
We work virtually. Drawings, schedules and accounts travel by email, so no job is out of reach.
The Problem · Where Housebuilders Lose It
The Margin Is Won and Lost Before a Brick Is Laid.
Sites are rarely lost on the build. They are lost on the appraisal that was too optimistic, the planning obligation nobody tested, and the design nobody costed until it was fixed.
Land bought on the wrong numbers
The appraisal was built to justify the price rather than to test it. Every optimistic rate in it becomes a real loss once the site is yours, and by then there is nobody left to negotiate with.
Section 106 accepted, not tested
Affordable housing and contributions are set at plan level on generic assumptions. Applied to a specific site with real abnormals, they can be the difference between a scheme that builds and one that sits.
Designs fixed before they are priced
Civils and structural packages are engineered to work, not to cost. By the time anyone prices the drainage runs, the road build-up or the foundation solution, the design is approved and the money is gone.
Nobody comparing like for like
Subcontractors price from the same drawings but to different scopes and different assumptions. Without a written scope you are not comparing prices, you are comparing guesses.
None of that is a site problem. It is a commercial one, and it is decided in the months before anyone breaks ground, by whoever did the sums. On most housebuilding schemes, that is a director doing it at nine at night between everything else.
Stage One · Land, Funding & Appraisal
The Numbers You Buy Land With, and Borrow Against.
Independent appraisals built from measured quantities and current subcontractor rates, not a spreadsheet of assumptions carried over from the last scheme.
Initial Feasibility
To negotiate the land purchase
A full build cost and residual land value for the site, prepared independently of you and of the vendor. That independence is the point: a seller can dismiss your own figures as a negotiating position, but a third-party appraisal that shows what the site genuinely carries is much harder to argue with, and it gives you a defensible reason to move the price.
Bank Feasibility
For development finance
The same appraisal set out the way lenders and their monitoring surveyors expect to receive it: build costs by element, professional fees, finance costs, contingency, sales values and margin, with the assumptions stated. Fewer questions at credit committee, and a faster route to drawdown.
Cashflow Forecast
For banks and investors
A month-by-month forecast of spend and receipts across the programme: what goes out, when, and what comes back in as plots complete. It is what the bank wants before it lends, what investors want before they commit, and what tells you the month the site runs tight while there is still time to do something about it.
Why independence matters. A vendor, a lender and an investor all discount a number produced by the person who benefits from it. Ours carries a name and a professional position behind it, which is exactly why it holds up in the room.
The Specialism · Section 106 Viability
Challenging Affordable Housing Requirements on Unviable Sites.
Policy targets are set across a whole local plan on generic assumptions. Your site is not generic, and the planning system has a route for saying so, provided you can evidence it properly.
Where the case comes from
- ▸A plan-wide affordable housing percentage is set on typical sites with typical costs. It cannot know about your abnormals.
- ▸Contaminated ground, deep drainage, attenuation, a difficult access, retaining structures, service diversions, a sloping site: none of that is in the policy assumption, all of it is in your cost.
- ▸National policy expressly allows viability to be assessed on a site-specific basis where circumstances justify it, and obligations to be renegotiated where a scheme cannot support them.
- ▸What decides it is not the argument. It is whether the figures behind the argument are built from measured quantities and evidenced rates, and stand up to the council's own reviewer.
What we produce
- ▸A detailed, site-specific viability appraisal: build costs measured from the drawings, not benchmarked from a rate per square foot.
- ▸Every abnormal identified, quantified and priced, with the evidence for each rate attached.
- ▸The residual land value tested against the price actually paid, and against a competitive return for the risk taken.
- ▸A written report your planning consultant can submit, and that we will stand behind if the authority appoints its own surveyor to review it.
This is the ammunition, not the argument. Your planning consultant runs the negotiation. We give them figures that survive scrutiny, and on schemes that genuinely cannot carry the obligation, a properly evidenced appraisal is the only thing that has ever moved one.
The Specialism · Value Engineering
Civils and Structures Are Designed to Work. Not to Cost.
An engineer is paid to produce a solution that performs and gets approved. Almost nobody is paid to ask whether it is the cheapest solution that does both, so the question never gets asked until the money is spent.
Designed without a cost brief
- ▸Drainage run to the easiest gradient rather than the shortest route, with depth, and therefore cost, nobody totalled.
- ▸Foundation solution specified conservatively because it is quicker to over-design than to justify a lighter one.
- ▸Road and driveway build-ups taken straight from the standard detail regardless of the actual loading.
- ▸Attenuation, retaining structures and levels strategy set before anyone knew what earthworks they implied.
- ▸Every one of those is approved, buildable and correct. It is also more expensive than it needs to be.
Reviewed against cost
- ▸Each element priced as designed, then re-priced against buildable alternatives that meet the same standard.
- ▸Levels and cut-and-fill tested so muck stays on site instead of leaving it on a lorry at a rate per load.
- ▸Specification challenged where it exceeds what the approval or the warranty provider actually requires.
- ▸Options put back to the engineer with the cost difference attached, so the decision is made on the numbers.
- ▸Done before construction, this routinely changes the profitability of a scheme rather than trimming it.
The timing is everything. Once the design is approved and the groundworker is on site, value engineering becomes a variation with a cost of its own. Reviewed before the scheme starts, the saving is clean, and it belongs to you.
Stage Two · Procurement & Tendering
Everything Your Site Needs to Buy the Job Properly.
Written scopes, measured quantities and comparable prices, so what you order is what you appraised, and what turns up is what you ordered.
£399 Per Trade
Tender documents for subcontractor pricing
A written scope and a measured schedule of quantities for each trade, issued to every tenderer so they all price the same job. Inclusions, exclusions and attendances stated, prices returned in a format you can compare line by line, and a contractor who prices it cannot later claim it was not in the scope.
Internal Orders
For labour-only subcontractors
Priced orders for bricklayers, groundworkers, joiners and every other labour-only gang: the work covered, the rate, what is measured and how, and what is not included. The argument about what the price covered is had once, in writing, before the gang starts.
Plant Schedules
What is needed, when, and for how long
Plant requirements set against the programme rather than ordered off the cuff when someone needs it. What is on hire, from when, for how long and at what rate, so standing plant with nothing to do stops being a cost nobody notices.
£299 Per House Type
Material schedules for tenders and ordering
Materials measured from the drawings for each house type, by element, in the units suppliers quote in. Use it to tender your supply, to place call-offs against the programme, and to check what is delivered against what the plot actually needs.
Measured once, used everywhere. The quantities behind the feasibility are the same quantities behind the tender documents, the material schedules and the valuations. Nothing gets re-measured from scratch and nothing drifts between one document and the next.
Stage Three · Through the Build
Cost Control While There Is Still Something to Control.
Monthly documents that keep the funder paid up, the subcontractors paid correctly, and every extra priced while the goodwill is still there.
Cost plans
An elemental cost plan for the scheme, carried forward month by month against actual spend and commitment, so you know where you are against the appraisal, not where you were at the last board meeting.
Interim valuations for the bank
Monthly applications in the form the lender and its monitoring surveyor expect, evidenced properly, so drawdowns are released on time instead of queried for a fortnight.
Valuing contractor applications
Subcontractor applications measured against what has actually been built and what the order covered, certified at the right figure, with the notices served inside the contractual deadlines.
Contra charges
Damage, attendances, welfare, plant, materials taken and works left unfinished, recorded, priced and set against the account as they happen, rather than remembered at the end and disputed.
Customer extras
Changes requested by purchasers priced properly before they are built, agreed in writing, and invoiced, instead of built out of goodwill and absorbed into the plot cost.
Quality control logs and RAMS
Plot-by-plot quality control records and risk assessments and method statements for the works, prepared in a form your site managers can actually keep on top of.
Built for site managers, not surveyors. Everything on this page comes back as a document your team can read, sign and file. There is no system to log into, no licence to buy and nothing for anyone on site to be trained on.
Stage Four · Settlement & Disputes
Closing Accounts Against People Who Do This for a Living.
The end of a job is negotiated, not calculated. It usually goes badly for whichever side turned up with a folder of delivery tickets instead of a valued position.
Final accounts
Every account closed on a measured position: works completed, variations valued, contra charges applied and retention accounted for. Negotiated by somebody who settles them for a living and knows what a normal outcome looks like.
Claims and disputes
Where a contractor claims delay, disruption or additional cost, the claim is tested against the records and the contract before a penny is conceded, and answered in a form that obliges them to substantiate it.
Payment disputes and notices
Payment notices, pay less notices and the statutory deadlines that decide who wins the argument regardless of the merits. Served correctly and on time, in both directions.
Contra charges and set-off
Charges evidenced and quantified as they arose, applied to the account correctly, and defended when the other side disputes them at settlement.
This is where the leakage is. Everything left open across the whole job gets decided in these few conversations, usually against someone whose full-time occupation is settling them. Ours is too.
What It Costs · Fixed Fees and Hourly Rates
Priced by the Document. Or by the Hour.
Take one document or the whole schedule. There is no package to buy into, no retainer and no minimum spend.
Per Hour, From
Fixed fees are fixed. You are told what a piece of work costs before it starts, and you approve it before anything begins.
Development feasibility
Per scheme
£995
Full build cost, residual land value and the assumptions behind both. For land negotiation, bank finance or a Section 106 viability case.
Tender documents
Per trade
£399
Written scope and measured schedule of quantities, issued to every tenderer so prices are comparable line by line.
Material schedules
Per house type
£299
Materials measured from the drawings by element, in the units your suppliers quote in.
Everything else
Per hour
From £35
Cost plans, cashflows, valuations, variations, contra charges, final accounts, claims and disputes, billed by the hour, from a single hour.
Where work is hourly, we scope the hours first and you approve those too, so there is no open-ended bill at the end of it.
How It Works · Getting Started
Send the Drawings. Agree the Fee. Get the Documents Back.
No onboarding, no software to learn and nothing for your site managers to be trained on. The whole thing runs over email and the phone.
Send us the site
Drawings, the engineer's package, the tender pack or the account that has stalled. A phone call and an email is enough to start, there is no form to fill in and no meeting to sit through.
We scope it and quote it
A fixed fee where there is one, or an estimate of hours at £35 where there is not. You approve it before anything starts, and you are not committed to anything beyond that piece of work.
You get the documents back
A feasibility you can negotiate with, tender documents you can issue, schedules your site can order from, valuations you can submit. Use us again next site, or do not, there is nothing to cancel.
Virtual, so nationwide. Drawings, appraisals and accounts travel by email. We work with housebuilders across England and Wales without a penny of travel on the bill.
Start with one site. Most clients test us on a single feasibility or one stalled account before they use us for anything else. That is exactly how it is meant to work.
No system to log into. Every deliverable arrives as a document: a spreadsheet, a schedule or a report. Your site managers already know how to read one, which is the only training anybody needs.
The Full Schedule · Everything We Produce
The Complete Schedule of Documents.
Take any one of them on its own. Most housebuilders start with a feasibility or a stalled account and work outwards from there.
Land & Funding
- ▸Initial feasibilities for land negotiation
- ▸Feasibilities for bank finance
- ▸Cashflow forecasts for banks and investors
- ▸Section 106 viability appraisals
- ▸Residual land value appraisals
- ▸Value engineering: civils and structures
- ▸Value engineering: specification review
Procurement
- ▸Tender documents by trade
- ▸Schedules of quantities
- ▸Internal orders: bricklayers
- ▸Internal orders: groundworkers
- ▸Internal orders: joiners and all trades
- ▸Plant schedules
- ▸Material schedules by house type
Through the Build
- ▸Elemental cost plans
- ▸Cost reporting against appraisal
- ▸Interim valuations for the bank
- ▸Valuation of contractor applications
- ▸Pricing of customer extras
- ▸Quality control logs
- ▸Risk assessments and method statements
Settlement
- ▸Final accounts
- ▸Contra charges and set-off
- ▸Claims and disputes with contractors
- ▸Payment disputes
- ▸Payment and pay less notices
- ▸Variation and additional works valuation
- ▸Retention release and close-out
One site or one document. There is no minimum engagement and nothing to sign. If all you need is a material schedule for one house type, that is a perfectly good place to start.
Put a Quantity Surveyor on Your Next Site Without Putting One on Your Payroll.
Send us the site you are least sure about, the engineer's design nobody has costed, or the account that has stalled. We will tell you what is involved and what it costs before you commit to anything.