New build vs renovation: two different pricing games

Builders who move between new build and renovation work often say the same thing: the trades are similar, the pricing is not. One is a quantities game played with near-perfect information. The other is a discovery game played against a building that is keeping secrets. Treating them as the same discipline is how margins disappear.

New build: the quantities game

On a new build, almost everything is knowable before you start. The drawings define the building, the engineer defines the structure, and the specification defines the finishes. Your job as an estimator is measurement and arithmetic: take off the quantities accurately, apply your rates, price the prelims against a realistic programme, and add a margin you can defend. The risk is not that the building surprises you. The risk is that you measure carelessly, miss a line, or price the programme optimistically.

Because the information is good, the discipline is completeness. A proper bill of quantities is the natural tool: hundreds of lines, each one small, each one checkable. New build estimating rewards the systematic and punishes the sloppy, and it does so with tight margins, because everyone else can measure the same drawings.

Renovation: the discovery game

Renovation inverts the problem. The drawings, if they exist, describe an intention. The building describes the truth, and it only does so once you open it up. What is under the floor, inside the wall, above the ceiling and behind the render is partially unknowable at quote stage, and some of it is unknowable until demolition. Rot, dodgy previous work, buried services, walls that turn out to be structural: the list is familiar to anyone who has refurbished anything older than themselves.

So the discipline changes. The estimator's job is no longer just measurement; it is risk allocation. What have I verified? What am I assuming? What is genuinely unknowable, and who is paying for it if it goes wrong? The tools of that trade are stated assumptions, honest exclusions, provisional sums for the murky bits, and a contingency scaled to the age and condition of the building, all of which we cover in how much contingency to allow.

Where the money behaves differently

That last row deserves care rather than confidence: VAT treatment depends on the specific project and the current rules, and getting it wrong is expensive in both directions. The safe habit is to check the position for each job before quoting, a topic we treat properly in VAT on building work.

A worked contrast, with made-up numbers

Suppose two jobs land on your desk the same week, each worth around £150,000 of turnover. The first is a straightforward new build garage and annexe from full drawings. The second is stripping a tired 1930s semi back to brick and rebuilding the inside. On the first, a thorough take-off might leave you comfortable with a lean contingency, because the unknowns are small. On the second, an experienced estimator might insist on a meaningful contingency, provisional sums against the wiring, the joist ends and the drains, and a clear line stating that anything found behind the plaster is priced when it is found. Same turnover, completely different risk architecture. If the client rejects the second structure and wants one flat number with no caveats, that is information too: they are asking you to insure a building you have never seen inside, for free.

The programme behaves differently too

The difference is not only in the numbers; it is in how the weeks unfold, and the weeks are money. New build programmes are broadly linear: trades follow each other in a known order, and a delay is usually a scheduling problem rather than a discovery problem. Renovation programmes breathe. The strip-out week rewrites the plan, a hidden defect pauses one room while another accelerates, and the builder spends real hours re-sequencing trades around what the building revealed. That management time is a genuine cost, and it belongs in the renovation price as supervision within the prelims rather than being absorbed as unpaid stress. It also changes the client conversation: on a renovation, promising a fixed end date with the same confidence as a new build is writing cheques the building may not honour. Promise a process instead: here is the programme, here are the checkpoints where we will know more, and here is how changes get priced when the walls speak.

Quoting both games with one system

The good news is that both games are won with the same habit: an itemised, line by line quote, produced quickly and structured honestly. On new build it proves completeness. On renovation it makes your assumptions visible and your provisional sums explicit, so discovery becomes a documented variation rather than an argument. QS Quoter builds that document for you from a description or a set of drawings, priced at your own rates, with a client copy, a private cost copy, and every line editable, so the risk judgement stays exactly where it belongs: with you.