Santa Barbara County · Preconstruction studio
The Estate Project Planner.
Answer nine questions about your property and scope. The planner assembles the complexity drivers, the documentation worth gathering, and a printable brief you can bring to any conversation — with us or anyone else. Nothing here is a quote; it is a map of what an honest estimate must resolve.
The property.
What this scope must resolve.
Select a location and a scope and the planner assembles the picture here — complexity drivers, documentation, and the questions an honest estimate must answer.
Cost education · 2026–2027 planning
The anatomy of a real budget.
We publish no dollar figures here — a number without your survey, your site and your scope is marketing, not information. What transfers across every project is the structure a complete budget must have. If a proposal you receive is missing one of these phases, that absence is the first question to ask.
- 01
Investigation & feasibility
Survey, geotechnical, existing-conditions assessment, title and easement review. Small relative to construction, and the line item that most often prevents the expensive surprises.
- 02
Design & engineering
Architecture, structural, civil, MEP, energy (Title 24) and landscape. Design fees scale with complexity and review rounds, not just square footage — a design-review-heavy jurisdiction budgets more here.
- 03
Permits, fees & studies
Plan check and permit fees, school and utility fees where applicable, and jurisdiction-specific studies. These are set by the agencies and change on their schedules — the current fee schedule, not a blog post, is the source.
- 04
Construction
The contract sum: structure, envelope, systems, finishes, site work. In 2026–2027 planning, the honest drivers remain scope definition, site difficulty, finish level and how much was resolved before the contract was signed.
- 05
Contingency & owner costs
A real budget carries contingency for what investigation could not see, plus owner-side costs: temporary housing, storage, landscaping restoration, furnishings. Budgets that omit these are not smaller — they are incomplete.
Planning in 2026–2027: material and labor markets, fee schedules and review timelines all move. Treat any figure older than a current bid against a defined scope as context, not a number to plan against.
Send the brief
Start the conversation.
This sends your brief through the same private, rate-limited inquiry channel as every RSA contact form. It is a conversation starter, not a commitment — and we reply from the Beverly Hills office.
Prefer email or phone first? Contact the studio
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