Met someone today who spent 45k on getting pp

[CalvinHobbes]

The amount shocked me! How common is this? What is the average amount?

[Adsibob]

Not sure how common, but unless you get PP first time, it can get expensive. We were badly advised to reject the LPA’s requests for concessions, and were advised to instead take the rejection and appeal. This turned out to be a questionable choice. We ended up getting more or less what we wanted about 2 years later, after a failed appeal and two further applications. Also spent a lot of money on a planning consultant to help with the appeal. All in all, close to £12k to get planning.

 

 Had we accepted the request for concessions, we would have ended up with a smaller extension, but probably a slightly nicer rear elevation and a much quicker approval, such that our build would have almost finished by the time COVID came. Instead, we started building mid way through lockdown.

[Nickfromwales]

One client came in just short of £25k and 2 years of bickering.

[Temp]

13 minutes ago, Nickfromwales said:

One client came in just short of £25k and 2 years of bickering.

 

I think I was probably about that.

[Dave Jones]

its all relative.

 

£50k on a 700k site is peanuts. £50k on a 100k site is painfull.

[SteamyTea]

18 minutes ago, Dave Jones said:

its all relative.

 

£50k on a 700k site is peanuts. £50k on a 100k site is painfull.

Isn't that the problem though.  The price should reflect the work, not the value of the site.

[DevilDamo]

It depends on the context of the proposals.

[patp]

Our architect advised us that it is the neighbours who police planning nowadays and to not worry too much about changing things like windows, doors, roof tiles etc. We moved the site a couple of metres North and the garage was relocated to avoid the sewer run. Lots of other material changes were made, during the build, to the doors, windows, bricks and roof tiles to name just few.  When I asked him if we needed to get these passed retrospectively he asked how long we planned to live in it. We have been building it for three years and have no plans to move. His reply was that, once four years have passed, you are likely to get away with it. We are not visible from the road and none of our neighbours took much interest in the details of our build.

[joe90]

10 hours ago, Adsibob said:

We ended up getting more or less what we wanted about 2 years later,

I got EXACTLY what I wanted in the first place after numerous applications and an appeal to the Secretary of State. Apart from a planning consultant (in my case not worth the money) I did it all myself so costs were minimal but several years delay.

[Furnace]

3 hours ago, SteamyTea said:

The price should reflect the work, not the value of the site.

Indeed, but it's also quite likely that a more valuable site will have a building that requires more work.

My Class Q permission cost 14k.(architect 6k; planning consultant 3k; structural, environmental, ecology, topo survey 5k)

The full permission cost an additional 31k (arch 16k; planning consultant 4k; environmental 7k; PHPP, newts and other stuff 4k.

225m² 2 storey, c.650k build cost.

Architect was expensive, but has held my hand. I'm meeting with them today to determine if I continue to use them for BC, tendering/negotiating with builders, and PM.

Edited June 14, 2023 by Furnace
typo

[SteamyTea]

1 minute ago, Furnace said:

but it's also quite likely that a more valuable site

Trouble with that is correlation is not causation.

A half hectare site in central London will have a very different price than a similar sized one in parts of Scotland.

 

I suspect there is a lot of 'customer's ability to pay' going on, rather than a true reflection of costs involved.

[Adsibob]

50 minutes ago, SteamyTea said:

A half hectare site in central London will have a very different price than a similar sized one in parts of Scotland.

Sure, but for a similar reason, an architect who works in Scotland likely lives there too, so their living and working costs will be significantly lower than if they lived and worked in London.

Edited June 14, 2023 by Adsibob

[SteamyTea]

27 minutes ago, Adsibob said:

Sure, but for a similar reason, an architect who works in Scotland likely lives there too, so their living and working costs will be significantly lower than if they lived and worked in London.

That is something I have never understood.

Why should a Doctor, Teacher or fireman get a different overall pay rate because if where they live. It is their skill, multiplied by the amount of work, that gets rewarded.

Does a Ford C-Max cost less in Cornwall, than in Hertfordshire, no.

Or a tin of baked beans.

 

Rather moving away from the subject, but I quoted a job for a company that were doing some work for BA. My quote was higher than my customer wanted to charge BA.

They tried to get my quote lower with the justification that they had a factory offices and 50 staff.

I just pointed out that they did not have the skill base to do the job.

 

[Thorfun]

5 hours ago, Dave Jones said:

its all relative.

 

£50k on a 700k site is peanuts. £50k on a 100k site is painfull.

£50k isn't really peanuts. our build won't be far off £700k and I can tell you that another £50k would be extremely useful! and if it had cost us £50k to get planning the first thing I would've had to do is go back to planning as I wouldn't have been able to afford what got approved.

 

just because someone has a big budget does mean they're loaded and have cash to burn.

[SteamyTea]

3 minutes ago, Thorfun said:

 

just because someone has a big budget does mean they're loaded and have cash to burn

Or have time to kill on here.

[Thorfun]

6 minutes ago, SteamyTea said:

Or have time to kill on here.

That’s what the day job is for….wasting time……errr….I mean researching important information on this wonderful forum. 

[SteamyTea]

32 minutes ago, Thorfun said:

That’s what the day job is for….wasting time

I must get a better day job then.

[joth]

2 hours ago, SteamyTea said:

Trouble with that is correlation is not causation.

A half hectare site in central London will have a very different price than a similar sized one in parts of Scotland.

 

I suspect there is a lot of 'customer's ability to pay' going on, rather than a true reflection of costs involved.

Often times the causation is not that people with deep pockets get charged more for the same work (although this definitely is a significant factor*), more that people with deep pockets have more ambitious / grandiose initial ideas and are more comfortable taking bigger risks in the initial application. They often also have bigger egos, so when that first application gets rejected they throw more money down on appeals and battles rather than taking the redesign. And/or they can be fickle and change mind more. After all this, worst case is the end result may still be watered down to something so modest that a more pragmatic customer would have submitted in the first place. So while the end result will look like not a lot of work was involved, there maybe months of sunk costs chasing dead end ideas.

 

* -  and of course there's naturally some national variation. The same work will cost more in areas with higher cost of living e.g. SE England simply because it costs the architect (and indeed all Trades) more in their fees; premises lease, wages, etc etc. We call that the "Beaconsfield tax" (insert name of home counties desirable town of choice here). A savvy customer may choose to remotely employ an architect that lives and works in a cheaper area, however that misses out on "local knowledge" about the area and sensibilities of the local planning office, and of course is that much harder/impossible for their other trades. 

 

 

@Thorfun just to highlight that Dave's comment was about a £700k plot, not total project cost. While I personally agree 50k is not peanuts, I do see it's a relatively small drop in a project that is likely to be £2M+  -- and attempting to rationalise this a bit more, there's no point throwing down 2M on something you're really not happy with from the outset due to one failed PP.

 

 

 

 

Edited June 14, 2023 by joth

[SteamyTea]

4 minutes ago, joth said:

Beaconsfield tax

You will get charged more in Beaconsfield if you pronounce it Beacon's Field.  Less if you say Holtspur.

If you live in Penn, pronounce it as Tyler's Green.

Edited June 14, 2023 by SteamyTea

[Big Jimbo]

@SteamyTea what do you call Gerrards Cross ?

[SteamyTea]

16 minutes ago, Big Jimbo said:

@SteamyTea what do you call Gerrards Cross ?

Metro Land.

 

Chalfont St. Giles is Cockney.

[LSB]

my dad spent lots of times pronouncing Aldeburgh as Al-de-burg and Happisburgh (haysbur) as Happy-is-burg

 

He hadn't been to East Anglian before.

 

Back the fees ours ended up near 30k

 

Architects - twice

SE - 2 different ones

Bat survey

Contamination survey

Tree survey

and I'm sure others as well, as I can't claim any VAT back I'm just trying to forget.

[SteamyTea]

10 minutes ago, LSB said:

Happisburgh (haysbur) as Happy-is-burg

I know someone that moved there, he did not look like a good swimmer.

 

10 minutes ago, LSB said:

hadn't been to East Anglian before

You only need to go once to have a scarred mind about how grim some parts of England are.

[Thorfun]

1 hour ago, joth said:

@Thorfun just to highlight that Dave's comment was about a £700k plot, not total project cost. While I personally agree 50k is not peanuts, I do see it's a relatively small drop in a project that is likely to be £2M+  -- and attempting to rationalise this a bit more, there's no point throwing down 2M on something you're really not happy with from the outset due to one failed PP.

that's a very fair point and my apologies for misinterpreting Dave's initial post.

[joth]

11 hours ago, Dave Jones said:

its all relative.

 

£50k on a 700k site is peanuts. £50k on a 100k site is painfull.

however having just made the case in favour of this view, looking at it the other way might be even stronger case: if you can convert a 100k plot without PP into a 400k value plot just by having PP approved on it, 50k sunk costs in doing so suddenly look like a no-brainer. As with all forms of financial speculation, it comes down to risk appetite.