In a recent post someone was asking to ballpark the survey costs for a 169 acre development site. One responder commented that some multidisciplinary firms would discount the initial site survey cost to get the job and make in up on the engineering side. In your experiences for land development, what would you say the average survey to engineering cost ratio is? Are the engineering cost all that much greater to eat the losses on the survey side?
That was always a sore spot with me at the big firm. I would provide a realistic survey budget, the higher ups would discount survey in order to get the engineering, and I'd be stuck with the discounted budget.
On a government, commercial or major private development my experience has been that engineering costs range from 10% to 25% of the project costs and surveying is 1%-3%.
Most of the time the surveying is considered incidental to the project and is usually the first to be cut or skimped on.
> That was always a sore spot with me at the big firm. I would provide a realistic survey budget, the higher ups would discount survey in order to get the engineering, and I'd be stuck with the discounted budget.
It only works for the survey manager if:
1. Corporate management keeps their end of the bargain and doesn't hold survey to the artificial budget.
2. The survey managers compensation is tied to corporate profits rather than division profit.
3. The survey manager has the ability to develop an external client base that accounts for at least a third of the divisions billings.
And it's probably not a bad rule to avoid any medium to large multidisciplinary firm that doesn't have a meaningful licensed survey presence in the C-Suite.