Which of two completely different scopes of work is the normal one?

A scope of work is the section of the agreement that lists exactly what the consultant will do and what you receive when they're done. It should name the deliverable, the format, the number of revisions, and what falls outside the work. Your friend is close but overstates it. The scope tells you what you're buying. Other clauses decide who owns the report, whether you can share it with a lender, and what happens if you want to stop halfway, and those matter a lot on land work.

There's no industry-wide standard deliverable in consulting. That's why your two quotes look unrelated. The 6,500 memo is most likely one person's judgment written up after a site visit and some desk research. The 18,000 engagement is buying separate pieces of work, and the entitlement path review is the expensive one. That means someone reads the zoning ordinance, checks the comprehensive plan, and finds out what approvals a given use would need and roughly how long the process runs in that jurisdiction. That varies enormously by state and by county, which is why nobody can quote it cheaply.

The question to ask both of them: is this an opinion or a study? An opinion is what they think. A study documents sources so someone else can check the reasoning. If you'll ever show this to a lender or a partner, you want the second kind and you want written permission to share it.

One more thing to pin down. Ask who pays for third-party costs like a survey, a wetlands screen, or a traffic count. Those often sit outside the fee and can add several thousand.