Design Survey Finds Firms Still Discounting Their Fees
Fees often define a design firm’s ability to win work and execute a project profitably. With competitive pressures now higher than ever, setting these fees has been a difficult task for most architectural, engineering, planning and environmental consulting firms.
Just over half of firms in the industry update their billing rates yearly, according to ZweigWhite’s recently released 2013 Fee & Billing Survey. Over the past three years, these rates have seen meager median increases of just 3%. Firms still felt some pressure to reduce or discount fees for various reasons, with 52% reporting discounting project fees over the past year. Of those firms that discounted project fees over the past year, the majority (63%) reduced the final price.