RICS costing arm the BCIS has come up with a novel way of advising construction clients on the cost of buildings around the globe – simply multiply the metres squared of a building by the current cost of petrol per litre.

For the UK the figure would be around £900 per metre squared, which the firm said wasn’t far off current costs.

The BCIS stumbled on the unusual way of guestimating average construction costs for countries while researching an economic study on Asia. Director Joe Martin said research into construction costs would always refer to average living costs in countries and the price of petrol appeared to closely mirror that of construction. “There is no real reason to it,” he said. “We are obviously not going to use it for a client wanting to build a new stadium but there is definitely a relationship. I’m confident enough to use the analogy for clients phoning up wanting to know about costs in a particular country.”

Source

QS News