The job in full
SEEK's Melbourne headquarters sits in Cremorne behind a twin gabled brick facade, and inside it is seven storeys of commercial fitout designed by Hassell. Costimate was engaged for the full estimate on a $40M–$50M tender: every trade measured, priced and packaged to support a competitive submission. It went out in 21 days.
Fitout is the version of this work that punishes assumptions hardest. On a new build the trades arrive in sequence and each one has a floor to itself for a while. In a fitout the services, the finishes and the joinery all land in the same square metre, and a drawing that is silent about which of them owns a junction is a drawing that will produce three different prices from three different builders. So the seven storeys were taken off trade by trade, and the clarifications were logged against the drawing set as the measure went on rather than collected at the end.
The caption on the marked up elevation elsewhere on this site is precise on purpose. It says measured from the tender set, not as built. This was a bid. The quantities came off the set that existed on the day, which is the only set an estimator ever gets to work from, and the value above is the scale of the work rather than a price anyone paid.
Two things carried the job. The first is that the measure came before the rate, so every line traces back to something drawn. The second is that the questions were written down where the reader would meet them. An estimate is read by people looking for the gap in it, which makes the packaging worth as much as the arithmetic: a summary that opens onto its own breakups, and the assumptions stated rather than buried.
SEEK is on the record for a full estimate and for the clarifications logged against the set while it was measured. It is one of the Victorian jobs behind our Melbourne page, and at $40M–$50M it is one of the larger commercial fitouts on the register.
