Why architects need to prove their worth – and charge for it

We hear that architects often resort to either buying jobs or at least flaying the flesh off their fees’ bones just to stay alive. Cutthroat price-slashing. Race to the bottom. Call it what you will.

I’ve heard this so often over so many years now – the latest time being in a recent Building Design piece by Nicholas Jewell – that I’ve internalised it as an eternal truth.

If it is true (and it probably is – no smoke without fire, they say), then it stinks.

And yet, no client wants a poor-quality service from their architect. No client has the power to compel architects to drop their fees, and you can’t blame them for going with the most economic option.

Architects say, “If I attempt to charge what I’m worth, then I’ll go out of business.” If that’s true, then perhaps they shouldn’t be in business.

Seriously: not charging decent fees is irresponsible to staff and creditors. And when professionals do it, you could argue that it is irresponsible to society. After all, we (i.e., society) need architects to operate profitably. We want them to invest in the R&D necessary to meet the good outcomes summed up in the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals. More fundamentally, we need them to work to the fullness of their professional capability on every job without scrimping or cutting corners so that these goals have a chance of being met.

Given all of that, here’s a provocation: wtf? Why is such a hugely educated, rigorously qualified profession that holds such a lynchpin position in a multi-billion-dollar global building design ecosystem, operating in a multi-trillion-dollar global construction industry, unable to charge enough?

The knee-jerk response is usually to moan. Non-architect building designers made us do it. Architects’ education doesn’t teach us business skills. The client doesn’t value us enough.

These are real challenges, for sure, and I sympathise. But you might just as well complain about death and taxes.

Obviously, there are things that architectural practices can do for themselves. This is usually bound up in something called business development and marketing, where you lean on your individual strengths to get ahead of the competition.

Architects who asked for feedback from their clients were more highly rated across the board than those who didn’t

As a feisty, self-centred survival mechanism, business development and marketing are indispensable tactics. But as a long-term strategy for the health of the profession, you need something meatier: collective action, ideally under the aegis of the RIBA.

So: what could be done to improve things at the level of the profession? The first action is to confirm that architects really do struggle to charge what they’re worth. After that, we need to find out how they know.

Do architects struggle to charge what they’re worth? A quick look at the RIBA’s 2024 annual business benchmarking survey reports that a subset of architects – chartered practices – seem to be doing OK. If my maths is right, profit as a percentage of expenditure is on average nearly 11% – 2% down on the previous year, apparently – but still pretty good, especially against a backdrop of increasing revenues. On the face of it, this does not suggest that the profession (chartered practices, at any rate) is in financial trouble.

How do architects know that this profit, which is healthy enough by most people’s standards, isn’t what they are worth? ‘Worth’ is a slippery concept, but in the context of earning fees, I’d suggest that it’s about how much better it is for clients when they use architects compared to when they don’t.

There are difficulties with this approach, though. For example, the things that clients value – their buildings and how their buildings help them to operate – aren’t solely the result of architects’ efforts and, indeed, are not divorced from wider financial trends. Not only would it be difficult to quantify the part that architects played in any uplift in a building’s value as a result of building work, but it might also be hard to differentiate that uplift from, for example, general rises in markets (housing, real estate, the markets that the client operates in, whatever).

Is there an alternative approach to quantifying architects’ value?

A few years back I thought so. I’d been involved in some RIBA research where construction clients were asked to rate their architects on many factors. We discovered that while clients generally loved the buildings architects designed, they were much less satisfied with how architects went about it. Crudely, product = good, process = bad.

In the seams of the survey data, we discovered an interesting nugget. Architects who asked for feedback from their clients were more highly rated across the board than those who didn’t.

If architects want to be able to charge what they are worth, they need to be able to supply evidence

This sparked my idea for Listenback, a kind of Trustpilot for all building designers (not just architects). It was predicated on certain observations:

• If seeking feedback from clients made them rate architects more highly, then they should seek feedback regardless.
• If architects sought feedback on the issues that we knew that clients cared about (from the research), it would give them valuable insights into how they could improve their service in ways that clients appreciated.
• If they received feedback consistently over time, they’d have an evidence-based way of tracking improvements as part of a quality management system.
• And if the data from all the feedback by all the clients on all the architects was aggregated, it would allow the owner of that data – I wanted it to be RIBA – to produce baseline stats on the performance of building designers in various categories and give individuals a Listenback rating.

The idea was that architects could act on this feedback, reflect their overall Listenback score in their business development plans and also, crucially, have a basis for making claims about their worth relative to their competitors. More importantly, perhaps, it would give the profession an evidence base for promoting their value in comparison to other building designers. The ultimate aim, of course, was to provide evidence to back up architects’ claims of their worth.

The Listenback web tool was free for building designers to use. It allowed them to sign up, create an account, issue a really succinct questionnaire to their clients, record clients’ ratings, and track their aggregate scores over time.

Although it generated some interest, almost no one gave it a go. I couldn’t persuade anyone to partner with me to develop it. I closed it down in 2020.

I still maintain, though, that if architects want to be able to charge what they are worth, they need to be able to supply evidence rather than just expect clients to take their word for it.

This would help in two ways. It would convince clients that they’re better off with architects. And it would give architects the confidence – which is so often what it is about – to ask for more.

>> Also read: Is an oversupply of architects driving down fees?

>> Also read: How did architecture become such a poorly paid profession and what can we do about it?