The Australian construction industry is currently struggling with very high costs of construction. This is influencing which projects are continued and which ones are delayed or discontinued. In this challenging context, how is it best to give pricing information?

Firstly, it is a hard and fast rule that suppliers should never promote sales discounts to architects. It doesn’t work. Architects cannot control the timing of the end purchase by the builder and so a price discount is effectively meaningless, other than to devalue the architect’s perception of your product.

Despite this, architects do want to know how much products cost, particularly in reference to other product options. Often architects will be working within price bands of low, medium, high or luxury in order to understand how your product might fit in the context of their project.

It is recommended to not feature pricing on your advertising, however depending on your product it may be worth adding it to your website in a carefully considered way.

Often the best way for this information to be communicated is in a conversation between architects and your specification representatives. This allows for all of the specifics to be taken into account and provides an opportunity for insight into what criteria the architect is specifying against. Make sure for these conversations that the likely costs of installation and maintenance are also at hand, as often there are trade-offs between different options.