What a site feasibility study costs

Ask for three quotes for a "feasibility study" on your plot and you may be given $150,000, $1,500,000 and $12,000,000. All three are real, all three are published, and none of them is wrong.

The trouble is not that one of them is dear. It is that the market gives the same name to two different products, and whoever asks for the quote hardly ever knows which of the two they are asking for.

Between the report on the plot and the prefeasibility study there is a factor of eight. What follows explains where it comes from, what to expect from each, and why Colombia has no rate to measure either against.

Two products, one name

The difference is not in the level of detail or in the page count. It is in the question each one answers, and they are two different questions put to the same piece of ground.

Why there is no reference rate

Every conversation about architects’ fees in Colombia ends at the Decreto 2090 de 1989, the only complete published methodology in the country. How it got there, and why it no longer binds anyone, is told separately in what an architect charges.

What matters here is simpler: does the decree set a rate for the preliminary study of a plot? Its clause 0.3 lists the work it covers, and there are nine kinds.

1. 1Concept sketch, concept design, detailed design and architectural supervision.
2. 2Housing layouts: concept design and detailed design.
3. 3Cost plan.
4. 4Cost control.
5. 5Programming and programme control.
6. 6Construction monitoring.
7. 7Construction.
8. 8Miscellaneous work.
9. 9Project management.

Read the list again. Every one of them begins once there is a design, or a building site, or at least a commission to draw. None of them is "study a plot before drawing anything". So it falls into the eighth, and the eighth is defined by what it is not:

And in case there were any doubt that the preliminary study belongs there, clause 8.1.4 names it outright when it lists what goes into that drawer:

For that chapter the decree sets no percentage and no figure at all. What it gives is a costing method: the architect charges enough to cover the cost of the work, the cost of running the practice and a profit. And three ways of settling it.

• —A multiplier, where the amount of work cannot be known in advance. It applies only to the salaries of the staff on the job, and the decree says its normal limits run between 2.5 and 3.5. The 3.5 is for work "of few days and great speciality, to solve a specific problem".
• —A fixed sum per day or per hour, for personal advisory work. The rate is built up from the professional’s salary, the cost of running the office and a profit.
• —Total cost plus a fixed sum, where the amount of work and its duration can be known in advance.

And even if it did price it, nobody would be bound: the decree lost its footing when the rule underlying it was repealed, and in 2020 the Consejo de Estado held that it may serve as a technical criterion "but in no case as a binding one".

So the factor of eight is neither chaos nor abuse. It is what happens when the one document in the country that could give an anchor expressly declines to price that work. Everyone costs their own, and nobody has anything to compare it against.

The only price with an official rate is the State’s

There is one exception, and it is worth knowing before asking anyone for a quote: two documents about the rules on your plot have their price fixed by national decree, the same across the country, and are issued by the very body that will later grant your permit.

With a warning the rule itself takes care to give, and many people find out too late:

So why would anyone pay a million and a half for something the curaduría urbana sells for a third of it? Because they are not the same thing. The ruling hands you the rules; the study hands you a reading of the rules against what you want to do. The ruling says the plot ratio is 1.5. The study says how many square metres that is, how many units fit, what the rear setback rules out, and what happens if the slope forces a retaining wall. If your question is the first one, the answer costs $519,791.

Eight questions before accepting a quote

1. 1Which question does this study answer: the planning one or the financial one? If the answer mixes the two, ask for the contents page of the deliverable before signing.
2. 2Does it contain financial analysis? Internal rate of return, net present value, break-even point, cash flow. Without them it is not a developer prefeasibility study and should not be priced like one.
3. 3Which rules is it built on, and as at what date? This is no formality: in Cali the land-use plan in force has an expiry date, and a study made today can end up between two sets of rules. It is set out in what happens to your permit if the POT of Cali changes.
4. 4Which documents about the plot are needed, and who obtains them? Title certificate, boundary survey, topographic drawing. A study that does not ask for them is working on assumptions.
5. 5Does it include the soil investigation? It should not, and that is no omission: Ley 400 de 1997 reserves that signature for a civil engineer, and Decreto 2090 itself says engineering studies "shall be paid by the contracting party and their value is not comprised within the architect’s fees".
6. 6Is it signed, and by whom? With a name and a professional registration number. An unsigned report commits nobody.
7. 7What if the conclusion is that you cannot do what you wanted? That study did its job too, and it is probably the one that saved you the most money. Ask as well whether the fee is credited against the next stage.
8. 8Can this be settled with the verbal enquiry and the written ruling? Sometimes it can. It is worth asking out loud before hiring anyone.

Anyone who answers those eight without flinching is telling you something more useful than their price. And if what you want to know is simply what the rules allow, that can be read: it is explained in what you can build on your plot. What the report you are handed ought to contain is in what a serious technical report must contain.

What this article does not claim

• —That these are market prices. They are three figures published by two firms. Colombia keeps no statistics on the price of preliminary studies, and three references are not a market.
• —That an official rate exists for this work. It does not, and Decreto 2090 says expressly that this is one of the works its fees do not reach. Nor does it bind anyone on the works it does price.
• —That the prices still hold. They are what the two pages published on 6 September 2026. A price without a cut-off date is false within six months, and this article has its own written down.
• —That the expensive study is overpriced. A property market study with financial projections is different work, with different inputs and a different professional behind it. Comparing it on price with a planning report compares two things that do not compete.
• —What Plano Base charges for this. It is absent on purpose: it is quoted case by case, because the scope of a study depends on the plot and on the question.

If you have a plot and a quote on the table, the fifteen-minute conversation to work out what is being sold to you costs nothing. It is by some way the cheapest moment to ask the eight questions above.