Notes on running an architecture practice.
Fees, planning rules and the business of winning work, across the United States, the UAE and India. Written from primary documents rather than repeated from other blogs, and honest about what could not be verified.
Why architects get paid late, and what the wait actually costs
The work is finished. The drawings are issued, the stage is signed off, the invoice went out weeks ago. The money is somewhere between the client’s accounts department and your bank, and while it is there, your practice is financing it.
Read it →The discount nobody names: what scope creep costs a studio
Additional work absorbed without a fee is a discount you never agreed to, applied after the contract, on the work you least expected to do.
Read →Where an architecture firm’s margin actually leaks
Six places the fee disappears between the proposal and the bank, the published benchmark for each, and the uncomfortable finding that the two metrics everyone tracks barely predict profit at all.
Read →What a ten per cent discount actually costs your studio
A ten per cent fee cut does not reduce your profit by ten per cent. At a typical architecture margin it removes about half of it.
Read →What an architect costs in Dubai, and what the authorities cost on top
Design and supervision are two separate commissions in the UAE. Here are the observed ranges, the milestone structure and the permit fees that actually apply.
Read →The Council of Architecture Scale of Charges, explained properly
India's architect fee scale is a statutory minimum, not a guideline. Here is what it says, how the stages release, and the notation that trips everyone up.
Read →What architects actually charge: fee benchmarks for the US, UAE and India
Observed fee ranges in three markets, what the percentage is calculated on, and why the answer is structurally different in each.
Read →Why architecture studios lose projects they have already won
Most practices do not have a demand problem. They have a response problem, and the industry data now says so out loud.
Read →Reading about it is one thing.
A free growth audit maps how work actually reaches your studio and where it is being lost, on your own numbers. You keep the findings either way.
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