Posted: April 22nd, 2015

Early Indication of Cost

Question 1.2 Early Indication of Cost (5%)

Background Information
Hopkins Consultants Limited (HCL) is a quantity surveying consultant firm in Melbourne. You are a junior quantity surveyor employed by HCL.
ALMIGHTY (Your client) is a multi-national company who is planning to extend its business to Melbourne. As part of the plan ALMIGHTY has bought a small piece of land in North Melbourne and intends to build a new bungalow for the future branch manager.
HCL has just been hired by ALMIGHTLY to provide quantity surveying services for the proposed North Melbourne project. You are appointed by your boss to manage this project.
ALMIGHTLY provided you a construction scheme design namely “House Type 44 “which will be built on the North Melbourne site. In order to assist in the cost planning process, your client kindly provided you a sample of Preliminary Estimate for a typical House Type 40 (for reference only) which was built for its branch manager in Singapore. Apart from a slightly different layout, structural and architectural designs for Type 40 and Type 44 houses are very similar. (i.e. you don’t need to query about the items you found from the sample Preliminary Estimate. However, all unit rates in the sample are obviously not applicable!)
Problem to tackle:
ALMIGHTLY request you to produce an Early Indication of Cost for House Type 44. He wishes to build this house on his plot of land in North Melbourne, starting construction in August 2015. It is intended that several of this prototype units will eventually be built for other senior staffs, depending upon the estimated construction cost of the current project.
Hints:
1. Decide the items to be included in the early indication of cost: Individual House (at what standard?? Read the sample to get an idea!), garage (with what standard??)!
2. Firstly complete all area-build-ups!!
3. Then prepare the unit cost build-ups (by finding relevant rates from Rawlinson handbook or equivalent + rate adjustment to reflect August 2015 price)
4. Make necessary assumptions (if required)
5. Prepare Summaries of Early Indication of Cost for the Project (reference from sample)
6. Prepare an exclusion list (items in the sample may need to be revised to suit your project, not all items in the sample are applicable and additional items are also required!!)
7. Write a memo and attach all the summary and build-ups to the client.