Add it up honestly for once. A senior engineer out of the office for half a day, a driver and fuel, then two hours back at the desk turning the measurements into a concept and a rough price. Call it $400 of your firm's time, and you do it eleven times a month. If three of those eleven sign, you handed roughly $3,200 of technical work to eight people who were never going to build with you, and none of it appears anywhere in your accounts.
Free work attracts the owner you do not want
An owner who is serious about building has no problem paying a small amount for a proper measured survey and a real budget. The person collecting free drawings to carry to whoever quotes lowest has an enormous problem with it. That is the whole point of the fee. It does not filter out good clients, it filters out the ones using your engineers as a free design office. If you have ever received a tender pack with a layout that looked oddly familiar, you already know where those drawings went.
Charge for the discovery, then credit it back
The answer is not to stop doing site visits. It is to sell the visit as a small piece of paid work with a deliverable attached, somewhere between $150 and $400 depending on the size of the project, and to take that fee off the contract if the owner goes ahead. The owner is risking almost nothing. If they sign, the visit was free after all. If they do not, they still hold something worth what they paid, and your engineer's day was covered either way.
Make the paid visit worth paying for
A fee only holds up if what comes back is a document rather than a conversation. Whatever you charge, the owner should finish the week holding something they could not have produced on their own:
- Measurements taken on site and recorded properly, not scribbled in a notebook
- A written scope: what you would do, and what you would deliberately leave alone
- A budget range in USD with the assumptions written next to it
- One concept option, enough to make the finished space real in their head
- An honest timeline that accounts for the permits that hold projects up
Give it a name and a price list the way you would any other service. The moment it looks like a product, the conversation stops being about a favour you are refusing.
What to say when they ask why it is not free
Your team will predict that every owner refuses. In practice most do not, provided the answer is calm and the reason is about them. Something close to this works: the first visit is a paid technical survey because we send a senior engineer rather than a salesman, and you leave with measurements, a scope and a real budget whether or not you build with us. It is $300, and it comes off your contract if you go ahead. Say it in the same tone you would use to quote any other line of work. Apologising for the fee is what makes it sound negotiable.
One warning. If an owner already has drawings from an architect and simply wants a price to build, that is a different situation and the fee usually does not belong there. Charge for the work you actually do.
Watch what happens to the numbers
Expect the number of visits to fall. That is the mechanism working, not the policy failing, which is why this needs two months before you judge it. Firms that were closing three visits out of eleven often end up closing three out of five, because the four or five bookings that disappeared were never going to sign. Your engineers get their days back, quotes go out faster, and the fees cover the visits that still do not convert.
Log these for two months before you change anything, then for two months after:
- Site visits booked, and how many of them showed up
- How many owners paid the fee without arguing
- Contracts signed as a share of visits, not as a share of enquiries
- Hours of senior technical time spent per signed project
- Fee income collected from visits that never became contracts
This is a pricing decision, not a personality change
None of this requires you to be difficult with people or to turn anyone away. It requires one decision: that the technical work your firm does before a contract has a price, the same as the technical work it does after one. That is a strange thing to argue about in a business that sells technical work for a living.
Ready for booked projects?
See if you qualify, we'll show you how our system fills your firm's pipeline.
See if you qualify
