Hello all,

I have recently come across these building cost estimators, and was wondering how effective they were in reflecting actual building costs. I know that the Illinois Railway Museum, Western Railway Museum, and Pennsylvania (among others) have all constructed buildings recently - and it would be great to see a comparison between the actual costs and the predictions made by the calculators. The parametric model includes a variety of factors that may make it possible to account for the special features needed by buildings that house rail equipment.

Parametric Cost Estimating Model for Buildings
http://www.aacei.org/technical/costmodels/BuildingModel.shtml

RSMeans QuickCost Calculator
http://www.rsmeans.com/calculator/index.asp

Tom Cornillie

They tend to be fairly accurate, if (and it's a big if) you're doing the kind of work they're intended to classify.

For example, I'd expect them to be pretty close for figuring out how much a single family home or small office building would cost. It's common to see building bids that are close together and apparently bid on a unit cost basis.

On the other hand, the more unusual stuff you add, such as increased floor thickness for heavier loadings, the more likely it is that they'll be off.

Of the two, I've heard of the Means book quite a bit, I'm not familiar with the other one.

They can be quite accurate, and many builders use similiar, if a bit more robust, programs to generate their bids.

However, as others have pointed out, they do best with "plain vanilla" structures. The closer your building is to a "typical" structure, the better they'll do on the pricing, and the more aggressive your bids will be when the time comes.

As soon as you start hearing questions like "You want a TRAIN TRACK through the middle of the building?" you're getting into unknown territory for most builders. The more unknowns in a bid, the more "contingency factor" they'll put in for stuff they don't expect. To solve that problem, have them build a conventional building, such as a pole barn, without the floor and then you do the custom stuff like adding track.

Also, get to know some of your local builders. Tell them you want an budget estimate, and they'll be happy to work with you. Make it clear it's an estimate, not a hard bid, otherwise they'll get annoyed at you when you don't award the project after they priced it down to the fine points. A budget estimate will get you pretty close without making them sweat all the details.

I think the programs will be fine for rough guides, and as was commented, I've also heard of, and used many years ago, the Means company. Not familiar with the other one.

"jorgea", whose message is now deleted by admins as discussed in the message below, is a spammer. His comments are 100% ignorant trash. The purpose is not to inform us, but to give a pretense to post all the garf you see at the bottom of his message. Those are links to websites, designed to "juice" search engines into thinking those linked sites are more important than they are.

He is probably paying some English-second-language person to "make stuff up" that sounds helpful, so the admins won't delete the message (and the garf). Delete it immediately without remorse. It's not a real person.

He necros old threads because they are indexed in Bing. Don't respond to these old threads, just let the admins kill the message and let the thread drop back down to page 470 where it belongs.

Killed the message, killed the user, banned his email and his user name, notified his ISP (with good documentation). In other words, I selected the nuclear option.

I have no idea to the guy's true intentions, but RS Means is a reputable outfit and is pretty much the standard by which commercial construction cost estimates in the U.S. are prepared. The guy may be bogus, but at least the second link is quite legitimate.

The problem is that when the spammer replies, they're no longer "old threads" unless you look at the date of the original message, and who goes to that detail? You see a reply and you post your comment in turn.



The forum software I use allows me to do the first three in about 2 clicks. "Delete Message As Spam" pushes the button to nuke 'em.

I wouldn't bother with his ISP unless it's here in the US and a reputable firm. Most of them don't care. If it's overseas, you can be almost guaranteed they don't care. Spend your time on something more productive.

Instead, I'd suggest considering joining this effort, which is making a big difference in the amount of spam.

Project Honey Pot: http://www.projecthoneypot.org/

The original post is legit. The reply, which I in turn replied to, has since been deleted. It was from a spammer.