For Tenants, Operators & Developers
A thin drawing set looks cheaper. Then the building department finds out.
Poorly coordinated documents don't fail on paper. They fail in plan review and in the field, as extra permit cycles and RFIs push your certificate of occupancy later. Every month late is a month you carry the project and don't earn from it. Here's what that actually costs.
Where The Money Leaks
Two sets. Same permit. Very different cost to build.
- Disciplines uncoordinated, so conflicts surface in the field
- Details left open: connections, assemblies, transitions
- Building department kicks it back for avoidable reasons
- Multiple permit review cycles, weeks apart
- RFIs and change orders stack up during construction
- Certificate of occupancy slips later and later
- Every discipline coordinated in BIM before submission
- Details resolved on paper, where they're cheap to fix
- Fewer plan-review comments, fewer resubmittals
- The contractor builds from it without stopping to ask
- Fewer RFIs, fewer change orders, a tighter budget
- Certificate of occupancy on schedule
The Calculator
What a delayed opening costs you
First, tell us who you are. Then set what you know: what you pay or collect each month, your construction budget, and how many rounds of plan review the drawings take. We handle the rest, the permit delay, the change-order rework, and the general conditions. Illustrative estimate, not a guarantee.
You're building out a space to run your business in, whether you rent it or own it.
A coordinated set typically clears in the first or second review. Each additional round adds about four weeks.
Fixed assumptions of a thin set
What the thin set costs you
$457,340
on a $2,000,000 project, from about 17 weeks of delay plus thin-set change orders
That's the number a coordinated set protects. Our documents are checked across every discipline before they reach the building department, so the review is short and the field is quiet.
When you're weighing design fees
Here is a simple example. The difference between a $15,000 set and a $50,000 set isn't $35,000. It's the number above. The cheaper set doesn't save you $35,000. It exposes you to $457,340 of added costs and lost revenue.
Don't believe it? Book a private consultation and we'll show you actual numbers from real projects like yours.
Book a Private ConsultationWhere The Compromises Happen
Same budget. Same decisions. A very different moment to make them.
A contractor can build a building, an office, a medical suite for a given number, and that part is true. The question nobody asks in time is whether that number is building what you actually pictured. Every project reconciles the vision with the budget eventually. The only thing that changes is when.
The usual way
Reconciliation lands in construction. Change orders, delays, and the architect and designer take the blame.
How we work
Reconciliation lands in design. Adjustments on paper, made together, before the price is final.
Who makes the call?
The decisions get made either way. The only question is who's holding the pen.
When the reconciliation lands in the field, someone has to decide, on the spot, what gives. Do you want that person to be your licensed architect and designer, whose only job is your project? Or the general contractor, who is also managing their own margin?
Plenty of good builders do right by their clients, and a respectable GC doesn't cut corners. But not every GC is that GC. And even the best one, forced to make a call in the field, is answering to two things at once: what is best for you, and what protects their bottom line. Those don't always point the same way. Make the decisions during design, with the team that works only for you, and the question never comes up.
The myth
Interior designers and architects blow the budget.
The truth
Design that never gets priced blows the budget.
The advice you'll hear
"Don't hire an interior designer. They'll blow your budget."
Here's the problem with that advice. A designer doesn't inflate your budget. They help you define what you actually wanted all along, and that was always going to cost what it costs. The designer isn't the risk. A vision that never got priced is the risk. Skip the designer and you don't avoid the number. You just meet it later, as a change order, once it's too late to plan for.
The whole job is setting expectations and meeting them, out loud, the entire way. Not designing cheap. Designing toward your budget, so the compromises happen on paper and not in the field. That is what a coordinated process really protects: your money, your timeline, and the vision you walked in with.
A Note From Nathan Aleskovsky
In commercial, your drawings decide two things: the price and the permit
I have a version of this conversation with almost every developer and owner I work with. If you've never built a commercial project before, I want to walk you through what actually happens. Not the brochure version, the real one, because the parts nobody warns you about are usually the parts that cost you the most.
How a commercial project actually gets built
Here's the shape of it. Someone designs the building, and those drawings then do two jobs at once. They go to contractors, who use them to price the work. And they go to the building department, who use them to decide whether you're allowed to build it at all. Hold onto that, because it's the whole game: your price and your permit both ride entirely on the quality of one set of drawings. If the set is thin, both of those things suffer, and they suffer in ways you won't see until it's expensive.
The price problem, first
This part works the same way it does on a house, just with more zeros. When the drawings don't specify the details, a contractor can't really price them, so they fill the gaps with assumptions and allowances, and those numbers run low, because a low number wins the job. The bid comes back and it looks like it fits your proforma. Everyone's happy. Then construction starts, the real conditions show up, and the change orders begin. On a home that's painful. On a commercial deal, where you underwrote the entire investment on that number, a moving price can turn a good deal into a bad one. A bid formed from uncertainty only ever moves in one direction, and it is never down.
Now the part nobody explains: permitting
This is where first-time owners get blindsided, so let me slow down. When you submit for a building permit, your drawings don't just get a rubber stamp. They get reviewed, line by line, by a stack of different people. Building, structural, mechanical, plumbing, electrical, and fire, and depending on the project, zoning, the health department, the utility, and the fire marshal on top of that. Each of them checks your set against their piece of the code. And here's the thing: if your drawings don't clearly answer their questions, they don't guess in your favor. They write a comment, a correction, and the whole set bounces back to you to fix and resubmit.
A resubmittal doesn't pick up where you left off. It goes to the back of the line. So the thing that really determines how long permitting takes isn't how many comments you get. It's how many round trips you make. One clean review might take a few weeks. Three rounds of corrections, each waiting its turn in the queue again, can take months. I've watched thin sets sit in permitting two and three times longer than they should have, purely because the drawings kept generating questions the reviewers had to send back.
Why the thorough set is actually the fast one
This feels backwards until you've lived it. People assume a lean set of drawings is the quick path, less to draw and less to wait on. It's the opposite. A complete, coordinated set answers the reviewer's questions before they have to ask them. Fewer comments, fewer resubmittals, fewer trips to the back of the line. The detail you'd think slows you down is exactly what speeds you up. When people ask why our sets are so thorough, this is half the answer. The other half is that the same detail keeps the price from moving. Speed and certainty come from the same place: leaving nothing for someone else to guess at.
Why the calendar is money here
On a home, a delay is stressful. On a commercial project, a delay is a line item. Until you open, you're carrying the loan, the taxes, and the insurance, and you're not collecting a dollar of rent or revenue. Every week stuck in an extra permit cycle, and every week a field conflict stops the crew, is a week that comes straight out of your return. That's what the calculator up the page is really showing you. The cost of delay isn't abstract. It's the mortgage on an empty building.
The coordination piece
There's one more thing that separates a commercial set from a residential one, and it's coordination. A commercial building is a stack of systems that all have to physically fit in the same space. Structure, ductwork, plumbing, electrical, and fire sprinklers, all threading through the same ceiling. When those disciplines aren't coordinated on paper, the conflicts get discovered by the contractor in the field, mid-build, as a question we have to stop and answer or a change order you have to pay for. We coordinate all of it in a single model before the drawings ever reach the building department, so the field stays quiet and the schedule holds.
How I do it instead
So here's how I run it. I keep the disciplines coordinated in one model, I bring a contractor in to price the design as it develops so the number matches your proforma instead of surprising it, and I build the set thorough enough to clear plan review in as few cycles as possible. One team owns the whole thing, from the first look at the deal to the certificate of occupancy. You're not refereeing five firms who each blame the others when something doesn't line up. You're working with one that's accountable for the price, the permit, and the schedule together.
The point
The goal was never a leaner set of drawings or a lower-looking bid. It's a price that holds and a permit that clears, because both were built on real detail instead of hope. In commercial, that is the whole difference between a deal that pencils and one that quietly bleeds while it waits. The number at the top of this page is what it costs when the drawings leave those things to chance. My process exists so they don't.
Nathan Aleskovsky
AIA · Principal Architect & Founder
Your Numbers, Reviewed
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