Two Ways In Which You Can Reduce Your Architectural Design Costs
By Lucky Balaraman
With the rise of the Internet, many kinds of work involving only information can be done in lower-cost parts of the world. (This awareness has a long way to go before it becomes commonplace.) A relevant example is how you can reduce the cost of architectural design by involving service providers overseas.

When you go to architects for developing the design of a building, the first thing you would naturally do is tell them about the kind of building you had in mind. You would describe its use and its size as well as give them a drawing of your property’s boundaries and a contour map.

The architects would then ask you for your ideas on the rooms you wanted the building to contain. You would identify the rooms; you would talk about roughly how big each should be and approximately where in the building you would want it positioned. You would give this information for each floor of the building.

The architects would come back to you with some preliminary sketches of floor plans. You and the architects would look at them and brainstorm, after which they would come back with revised sketches. After two or three repetitions of this procedure, the floor plans would be finalized.

The architects would then have the floor plans drawn on a computer using a computer-aided-design (CAD) program. These are known as schematic plans.

All this could cost you anywhere up to $1.35 per square foot. However, you could save as much as 50% on this by going to competent architects in other countries for your schematic plans. Think of how much this would come to for a 4,000 square foot

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A small search on the Internet is all you need to do to locate suitable overseas firms.

Once you have your schematic plans, the architects will put in detailed information for your builder. This includes information on the materials to be used as well as the design of doors, windows, stairs and the roof. The finished set of drawings is called the set of ‘construction documents’. The architects must stamp this for a builder to be able to proceed with them.

The architects spend a great deal of money getting these drawings prepared on a computer (which involves much more CAD than schematic design production). These costs are naturally passed on to you with a suitable markup. This leads us to the second cost-saving strategy.

To save up to 50% on these costs, direct the architects to a suitable CAD drafting service provider overseas. Again, you can locate such firms by doing a simple Internet search.

Using both these methods you could save as much as $1 per square foot in your architectural design costs. This adds up to some real money, and it’s all on the table, ready for you to take with very little effort.

My advice you is understandably simple: Go for the methods NOW, my friend!

Lucky Balaraman runs one of India’s prime architecture and CAD drafting service providers, The Magnum Group. Learn more about the Company at cad-drafting-services.com

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