Read the number.
Don’t just accept it.
Open-book pricing means we sit you down and walk you through the complete costing schedule for your project — every trade, every allowance, every supplier quote, and our margin.
Every line.
Including ours.
Most builders hand you a single number and ask you to trust it. We bring you into the office and take you through the costing schedule line by line — every trade, every allowance, every supplier quote, and our margin stated plainly.
It means you can see exactly where the money is going, question any line in the room, and make the trade-offs yourself instead of finding out about them at handover.
How we price →In the room,
not in your inbox.
The pricing presentation
You come into our office and we take you through the costing schedule on screen, line by line and trade by trade. Every item carries the quote or rate behind it, so you can see what a number is made of rather than taking it on faith.
Questions answered on the spot
Where something genuinely can't be priced yet, it's shown as a provisional sum with the assumption beside it — not folded quietly into a larger figure. Ask about any line and you get the answer in the room, not a week later.
Our margin, stated plainly
Stated as its own line. You know what we're making on your house, which means you never have to wonder whether it's buried somewhere else.
The formal quote
After the first session we send you a formal quote. Depending on the complexity of the project and how far the design has progressed, there may be several pricing sessions in the office before anything is signed.
“People don't distrust builders because of the price. They distrust them because they can't see how it was arrived at.” — Jordan Templeton
The questions worth
asking any builder.
Doesn't showing your margin invite clients to negotiate it down?
Occasionally. More often it ends the conversation about margin altogether, because you can see it's reasonable and you stop wondering what's hidden in the other numbers.
What is a provisional sum, and why does it matter?
It's an allowance for work that can't be priced exactly yet — often because a selection hasn't been made or something is still hidden. Under an open book, every provisional sum is reconciled against the real invoice and the difference goes back to you.
How is this different from a fixed-price contract?
It isn't an alternative to one. You can still have a fixed price. The difference is that you can see the schedule that produced it, so you know which parts are firm and which carry allowances.
Do other Adelaide builders do this?
Some do parts of it. Showing the margin line itself is rarer, and it's the line that matters, because it's the one clients assume is being padded.
See it applied to your project.
We’ll walk you through a real costing schedule and show you exactly what you would receive.