Quantity Surveying & Cost Planning
What the fencing should cost, worked out from the job rather than from last year plus ten per cent.
Why people bring this to somebody outside
Fencing is one of the larger line items on a rural or civil budget and one of the least examined. It usually arrives as a single number carried forward from a previous project, and it is either badly wrong or accidentally right. Neither is much use when you have to defend it to a board, a bank or a council committee.
I build the number from the ground up: measured lengths, counted assemblies, real material rates, realistic access and cartage, and an allowance for the ground conditions that particular site is going to produce. That gives you a budget estimate early, when the decisions are still cheap, and a detailed cost plan later when the design is settled.
The other half of the work is checking numbers you have already been given. When three tenders come back thousands apart the instinct is to assume somebody is expensive. Usually nobody is. They have priced three different fences, and the cheapest one is cheapest because of what it left out.
Gateways, strainer assemblies and access are where two quotes for the same fence stop being the same number.
What this covers
Budget estimates
An early order-of-cost figure you can put in a feasibility or a capital plan and defend.
Detailed cost estimates
Measured and priced line by line once the design is far enough along to support it.
Tender pricing reviews
What each tenderer has actually allowed for, and where the real differences between them are.
Cost planning
Costs staged across a programme or across financial years, so the money and the work line up.
Value engineering
Where the money is going, and which reductions are savings rather than deferred spending.
Variation assessments
An independent read on whether a claimed variation is fair, and what it is genuinely worth.
Who this is for
- Corporate buyers pricing the fencing liability on a farm before they commit to it
- Councils and utilities preparing capital budgets and long-term plans
- Developers testing the feasibility of a subdivision where boundary fencing is a real cost
- Anyone holding three quotes that differ by more than they can explain
What you get
- A written estimate or cost plan with the quantities and rates shown
- A tender comparison setting the prices out on the same basis
- A note of what to go back and ask each tenderer
- A variation assessment with reasoning, where one is in dispute
Costed and agreed before I start, never after. A phone call about a straightforward question is usually free.
Often taken together with
Tender & Procurement Services
Getting the job to market properly, so the prices that come back can be compared and relied on.
Read more →Fence Design & Specification
Deciding what is going in, and writing it down properly, before anybody is asked to price it.
Read more →Asset Management
Knowing what fencing you own, what condition it is in, and what it is going to cost you over the next ten years.
Read more →Paid for the advice, not for the work that follows
I am a certified fencer and I also own a fencing contracting business. That is stated up front rather than buried, because it is the first thing anybody sensible wants to know about an independent adviser.
The rule is simple and it does not bend. If I am advising you, my contracting company is not tendering for your job. You can have my advice or you can have my crew, and you cannot have both on the same project, because the moment you could the advice stops being worth anything. If you would rather have the fence built than the question answered, I will say so and point you elsewhere.
It works the same way in a dispute. I give the same finding whichever party is paying for the assessment, and if your position is the weaker one you will hear that from me first.
The contracting business is Custom Fencing Ltd, which is where the experience behind all of this comes from - and it is disclosed here so that you can check it rather than discover it.
FCANZ Certified Fencer. The Fencing Contractors Association of New Zealand assesses fencers against a practical standard that has to be maintained rather than earned once. The reason it matters here: the advice comes from somebody who still has to go out and build to the standard he is describing.
Tell me what you are trying to work out
Most people get in touch because they have a decision to make and nobody independent to check it with - a tender that does not add up, a fence line that keeps failing, a dispute that has stopped moving, or a property they are about to buy. Describe the situation and I will tell you honestly whether it needs me, and what it would take.
021 614 100- nick@customfenceconsulting.co.nz
- 130 Edinburgh Street, Waikouaiti 9510, Otago
- Monday to Friday, 7am - 5.30pm
Based at Waikouaiti in East Otago and working throughout New Zealand. Site work anywhere in the country; desk work - a tender review, a specification, an opinion on a set of photographs - can start the day you send it.