Office, studio and commercial fit-out, designed and built against one contract — so one party carries the price, the programme and the snag list.
Published UK benchmark rates, applied to your floor area and your lease. It will tell you the range, what it costs a year across the term, and how long before anyone can sit in it.
The property management consultancy team at Fraser Bond delivers a highly professional and tailored commercial property management service, focussed on responsible property management. Our clients include developers, investors and occupiers in the public and private sectors — served from each of our UK regional and London offices.
The reason design and build exists is that the alternative splits responsibility. Design one side, construction the other, and every clash between them becomes a conversation about whose drawing was wrong while the programme runs on. Under a single contract the contractor owns the design it is building, so a clash is its problem to solve rather than yours to arbitrate. You give up some control over the detail in exchange for a price you can rely on earlier. Whether that is the right trade depends on the job, which is what the diagnostic on the services page is for.
Survey and measured drawings, design and specification, landlord consent, procurement, the build itself, commissioning, and the handover pack you will need at the end of the lease as much as the beginning.
Bringing a floor back to a lettable standard between tenancies.
Explore →Everything from the Cat A shell to the day people sit down.
Explore →Often the cheapest fit-out is the one that needs less floor.
Explore →Landlord consent handled before work starts, not discovered after.
Explore →Priced at the start of the lease, when you can still do something about it.
Explore →Design and build is not always right. The diagnostic says when it is not.
Explore →Most fit-out overspend is not bad pricing, it is incomplete scope — a survey that missed the asbestos, a service that could not be reused, a landlord condition nobody read. We would rather spend longer on the scope and give you a number that holds than win the job on one that does not.
Cat A is the landlord-standard finished shell — raised floors, suspended ceilings, lighting and basic building services, lettable but not usable as it stands. Cat B is everything that turns it into your premises: layout, partitions, finishes, furniture, data, kitchens and meeting rooms.
Published UK benchmarks put Cat A at roughly GBP 40 to 70 per square foot in London and GBP 25 to 45 in the regions, and Cat B at roughly GBP 80 to 150 in London and GBP 50 to 90 in the regions. Those are wide ranges because specification and building condition drive them. The estimator on this page applies them to your area and lease.
Published benchmarks give 8 to 16 weeks on site for a Cat A and 12 to 24 weeks for a full Cat B, with at least 6 to 8 weeks of design before anyone is on site and at least 4 weeks of float worth carrying. A shell-to-occupation job runs the two on-site phases in sequence.
Almost certainly. Most commercial leases require a licence to alter for anything beyond trivial works, and most also require reinstatement at the end of the term. Both are better established before the design is fixed than after.
Yes. If you have a completed design from your own architect we can price and build it, which is traditional procurement rather than design and build. The route changes who carries the design risk, so it is worth deciding deliberately.
Yes, and it is usually cheaper to plan for it at the start. A dilapidations liability priced on day one can change what you build; priced at the end, it is simply a bill.
The estimator gives you the range for free. A proposal needs a survey, and that is where the range becomes a number.