How to read a villa build quote.

A price is an output. What produces it is a scope, and a scope is a document that says plainly what is included and what is not. If you are comparing quotes, you are really comparing scopes, and the cheaper one is very often the one that has left more out.

The scope is the document that matters.

A scope written properly runs trade by trade and says, for each one, what is being done and to what standard. It should be legible to you without a quantity surveyor. Ours reads as a written scope, trade by trade, saying plainly what is included and what is not, because that is the only version a client can actually check.

What you are looking for is specificity in the places where money hides:

• Enabling and external works. Boundary walls, gates, driveway, landscaping and drainage are frequently outside the headline figure.
• Authority approvals and fees. Who submits, who pays, and whether consultancy fees are inside or outside.
• Specification level per finish. "Tiling" is not a scope. An allowance per square metre, or a named product, is.
• Services capacity. Air conditioning tonnage and distribution board capacity are design decisions with real cost, not details.
• Making good and cleaning. Small until it is not.

The cheapest quote and the most expensive quote are often the same building. One of them has just told you less.

What a lump sum hides.

A single figure for a whole villa is not dishonest in itself, but it is unfalsifiable. You cannot tell which assumptions it contains, so you cannot tell what happens when one of them turns out to be wrong.

The specific risk is that every assumption becomes a variation later. If the quote assumed a particular ground condition, a particular finish level or a particular scope of external works, and the reality differs, the difference is chargeable. A build that starts cheap and ends expensive usually started with a number rather than a scope.

What to ask for instead is the same total, broken down by the lines of work: civil and structure, MEP, finishing, and fit out and joinery. Four numbers tell you far more than one, and they let you compare two quotes line by line even when the totals are close.

Provisional sums and allowances.

A provisional sum is a placeholder for work that has not been fully defined yet. It is a legitimate device: nobody can price joinery before the joinery is designed. But it is not a price, and it will be replaced by the real cost when the work is defined.

So count them. A quote with a handful of provisional sums against genuinely undesigned items is normal. A quote where the kitchen, the joinery, the landscaping and the external works are all provisional is a quote where a large part of the final figure has not been established, and comparing its total against a fully priced one is comparing two different things.

What turnkey actually means.

Turnkey is not a defined term. It means whatever the contract in front of you says it means, and it is used to describe everything from a fully finished and furnished villa to a structure with basic finishes.

The useful question is not whether a quote is turnkey. It is what the quote excludes. A contractor who can answer that quickly and specifically has thought about the job. One who says "everything is included" has not, because something is always excluded, and finding out which thing during the build is the expensive way to learn it.

Five questions that expose a thin scope.

1. Can I see this broken down by trade? If the answer is no, there is nothing to compare.
2. What is explicitly excluded? A good scope has an exclusions list and is not embarrassed by it.
3. Which items are provisional, and how are they settled? Both the count and the mechanism.
4. What is the programme, and what are the approval durations in it? A price without a programme is half a proposal. The other half is who approves what, and when.
5. How are variations priced? Agreed rates before the build beat negotiation during it.

None of these are adversarial questions. They are the questions a contractor who intends to run the job properly expects, and the answers are the difference between a price and a proposal.

The terms that sit behind the number.

Two quotes at the same price are not the same offer if the payment terms differ, and terms are where a build gets uncomfortable long before the finishes do.

• What triggers each payment. A stage tied to completed work you can stand in front of is very different from a stage tied to a calendar date.
• How much is due before anything happens. A mobilisation payment is normal. A large one, against a programme with no early milestone, is worth asking about.
• Whether retention is held, and when it is released. Retention is the mechanism that makes the last five per cent get finished. A quote with none has removed your leverage at exactly the point you need it.
• What happens if the programme slips. Whose slippage, measured how, and with what consequence.

A contractor who has thought about the job has already thought about all four, and will not mind being asked.

If what you actually need is people on your own site rather than a contractor to run the whole build, that is a different arrangement with a different cost structure: what to specify when you hire manpower.

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