However I price this stalled 40 unit infill, I get it wrong

Five years of doing this and the thing that has cost me money every single time is undefined revisions. Your $6,000 fixed becomes $6,000 plus three meetings with the equity partner plus a call with the lender's inspector plus a second version because the GC pushed back on your numbers.

Write the deliverable as a document with a page count and one review round. Anything past that is billed at an hourly rate you state in the same paragraph. It feels petty to write down and it saves the relationship, because when he calls the fourth time you're pointing at a line you both agreed to instead of getting annoyed.

Who does the work while you're doing this? I run four people and the honest constraint on my consulting is that any engagement over about 30 hours in a month means something else on my desk slips. If you're carrying other jobs, the retainer isn't a pricing decision, it's a capacity decision, and $2,500 a month is cheap for a month where you can't take other work.

Also the through-construction version he might ask for. That's a real job with a real time commitment. Decide now whether you want it, because if you don't, don't write a report that positions you as the only person who understands the budget.

Before the fee, the paper. Three things I'd want in the engagement letter and one of them will feel unfriendly.

Limit of liability capped at the fees paid. Standard in advisory work and worth asking for.

A clear statement that you're not acting as the engineer or architect of record and that your review is based on documents he provided, listed by name and date. If a sub's scope gap turns into a $200k change order later, you want the record to show what you had.

Whether your work product goes to the lender and the equity. If it does, they may be relying on it, and reliance by third parties is exactly the thing your insurance carrier will ask about. E and O for advisory work is a conversation with a broker, not something to guess at.

What state is this in? Some states are stricter than others about what a non-licensed party can put in writing about construction means and methods, so run the scope past an attorney in that state once.

You've read the bid tabs. Have you read the GC agreement he's proposing to sign?

Because the 12% question is partly a contract question. Allowances, how they reconcile, and who owns the savings. Shared savings language with a low target and a soft allowance schedule will produce a bid that looks 12% high and finishes 15% high. Same with escalation clauses that let the GC re-price steel or switchgear at buyout. If his contract lets three trades re-price after signing, the number you spend 40 hours reconciling isn't a number, it's a placeholder.

I'd ask for the draft agreement and the allowance schedule as a condition of quoting. If he won't hand them over, that tells you something about the engagement too.

Different question and sorry if it's the wrong thread for it. How did he get to you? I'm starting from zero and the part I can't picture is the moment someone decides to pay for advice instead of asking a friend for free.

$6,000 to save him a chunk of a 12% overrun on 40 units is nothing and you both know it. Quote the retainer, don't apologize for it, and if he's too cash constrained for $2,500 a month he's too cash constrained to build this.

The lender asked for a revised budget, which means there may already be a third party cost review in their loan requirements. If there is, the borrower usually pays for it out of closing costs or the project budget. Worth him asking his lender whether your scope can sit inside that requirement instead of alongside it, because then your fee is a project cost rather than money out of his pocket this month. He needs to confirm what the lender will accept in writing, since who they'll accept as a reviewer varies by lender and some will only take firms off their own list.

You buried the actual question. He doesn't want to know where the 12% lives. He wants to know whether the deal still works at the new number, and if it doesn't, whether it works after re-bidding two trades.

So the deliverable I'd write has a front page that's four lines. Original hard cost, GC number, your reconciled number after re-bid, and the delta against the equity's return threshold at his current rent assumptions. Everything behind that is support. If you hand him 30 pages of trade analysis without that front page, he takes it to his equity and they ask him the same question and he calls you again for free.

And flint is right on price but wrong on why. The fee isn't justified by the savings, it's justified by the fact that nobody else can read those tabs on his timeline.

Run the numbers on your two options and the choice mostly answers itself.

$6,000 fixed at 40 hours is $150. At 80 hours it's $75, at 120 it's $50, and you said you've seen a tab take 40 hours to reconcile before you get to re-bid scoping. So the fixed fee is a bet that this is the easy version.

$7,500 over three months at your guess of 100 total hours is $75 an hour, which is worse than the fixed fee at 40 hours and better at 120. Both of your options are priced off a number you don't have.

Which is why lantern's paid discovery is the only clean answer here. Charge for the week that produces the estimate. What's your target rate, actually? If you can't say it, that's the thing to settle before you send the counter.

Reading this whole thread as the guy with zero deals and it's clarifying in a way I didn't expect. girder is getting paid for knowing how subs scope work differently, which is not a thing you can read your way into. Six months of research and I don't have one skill on that list.