The questions owners ask before they hire a builder.

As of our July 2026 review, and per square foot of covered area:

A five-marla double storey of about 2,050 sq ft therefore lands somewhere between roughly 1.15 and 1.5 crore turnkey at standard specification. The range is wide because span, storeys, basement, boundary wall length and finishing choices move it a long way. Anybody who gives you one exact figure on a first phone call is guessing, and the guess will be low.

Grey structure is the building complete but unfinished: foundation, RCC frame, brickwork, internal and external plaster, roof waterproofing, electrical conduits and water pipes buried in the walls, chowkats fixed, tanks built. You can stand in every room, but there are no floors, no paint, no doors, no fittings.

Turnkey is grey structure plus every finishing trade, up to a house you can move into — flooring, tiling, woodwork, wiring and fittings, sanitary, paint, grills and gate.

Many owners in Lahore do grey structure with a contractor and finishing themselves over a following year, as money comes in. That is a perfectly sound way to build and we are happy to take just the structure. Do it deliberately, though — leaving a grey structure standing through two monsoons without at least the roof waterproofing done will cost you in repairs.

Yes. That is a labour-rate contract and roughly a third of our residential jobs are done this way. We provide the crew, the tools, the mixer and vibrator, the supervision and the quality control; you buy and deliver everything else.

It can genuinely save money if you have time — someone has to be at the market, take delivery, count bags, check the steel is what the invoice says and store it dry. Where owners lose money on this arrangement is wastage, emergency purchases at retail rates when something runs short mid-pour, and holding the site idle waiting for a delivery. We issue a stage-by-stage material list with quantities and lead times so you can order ahead rather than react.

Ten per cent on mobilisation, then payments against completed and measured stages — foundation and plinth 15%, ground floor slab 20%, first floor slab 20%, masonry and plaster 15%, finishing 15%, and 5% released at handover once the snag list is cleared.

Nothing is due for a stage until that stage is finished and measured. You are always paying for work you can see and touch, never for work promised next month. If a contractor asks for 30 or 40 per cent up front on a house, ask him what exactly that money is buying before the first truck arrives.

The contract carries an escalation clause covering steel and cement only — the two items that genuinely move in Pakistan — and it works both ways. The base rate is recorded at signing. If the market rate moves beyond an agreed band, the difference is applied to the quantity remaining, supported by the actual purchase invoices, which we show you.

Nothing else escalates. Bricks, sand, crush, labour, tiles and fittings stay at the contract rate, and we carry that risk. We also tell owners honestly that the cheapest protection against escalation is buying steel early when the price is reasonable and storing it properly — several of our clients have done exactly that.

No. Estimates, the first site visit and the initial discussion are free, whether or not you go ahead. What we do charge for, if you ask for it, is design work — an architect's or structural engineer's drawing prepared specifically for your plot. Those fees are quoted separately and are yours to keep regardless of who builds.

For a double storey without a basement, working months from setting-out to handover: 5 marla, 8 to 10 months turnkey; 10 marla, 11 to 13; 1 kanal, 15 to 18. Grey structure alone is roughly half of that. Add six to eight weeks for a basement.

The programme goes into the contract as dates with a bar chart, not as a vague assurance. We would rather quote you eleven months and hand over in ten than promise eight and deliver in twelve.

The application is in the owner's name and the fees are paid by the owner, because the approval attaches to your property, not to us. What we do is prepare and coordinate the submission drawings with your architect, prepare the structural drawings for submission, and follow the file through LDA — or DHA, the cantonment board, Bahria Town's own office, or whichever authority controls your scheme.

Approval timelines are not in anybody's control. Budget six to ten weeks for a straightforward residential file in an LDA scheme, and longer for commercial or where the plot has an issue in its record. Start it before you start thinking about excavation.

Yes, and please do not skip it. We prepare the completion drawings, deal with the inspection, and follow the file until the certificate is issued. A house without a completion certificate is harder to sell, harder to mortgage, and exposed to penalties if it deviates from the approved plan. It is far cheaper to build to the approved plan in the first place than to regularise a violation afterwards — which is one reason we will tell you plainly when a change you want will not be approvable.

Commercial category building plan approval from the relevant authority; commercialisation and conversion fees where the plot is not already commercial; WASA water and sewerage connection approval; a fire safety NOC and approved means of escape for buildings above the prescribed height; environmental clearance from EPA Punjab for larger developments; and the completion certificate at the end.

Parking provision is where most commercial files get stuck. The approved plan must show the required parking for the built-up area, and an owner who quietly builds shops over the parking area will meet that fact again at completion stage.

Yes, and any builder who says otherwise has not built through a Lahore July. Heavy rain stops slab pours and external plaster, floods open excavations and delays curing schedules. In December and January, fog and low temperatures slow strength gain, so props stay in longer. During a declared smog emergency, dust-generating activity — excavation, cutting, grinding — gets restricted by the district administration.

We plan around it: structural work scheduled to clear the worst of the monsoon where the start date allows, materials covered and stacked off the ground, site drainage cut before the rains rather than during them, and the expected weather days shown in the programme instead of appearing later as an excuse.

The BOQ names them before you sign. Typically: OPC 53-grade cement from Maple Leaf, DG Cement, Bestway or Fauji; Grade 60 deformed bar from Amreli, Mughal or Agha Steel; Margalla crush; first-class kiln brick; Master, Sonex or Porta sanitary ware; Pakistan Cables or Newage wiring; Dadex or Popular piping; ICI Dulux, Nippon or Berger paint.

Checking is your right and we make it easy: every delivery is entered in the site register with the challan attached, steel comes with the mill test certificate, and cement bags are stacked in the store with the manufacture date visible. If you want to be there when the steel is unloaded and weighed, tell us and we will call you before the truck comes.

Every structural pour is sampled. Six cubes are taken, three broken at seven days and three at twenty-eight, at an independent testing laboratory — not by us. The report goes to the owner with the stage bill.

Standard residential columns and slabs are designed at 3,000 psi minimum; commercial work and long spans at 3,500 to 4,000 psi. If a 28-day result comes in below specification we core-test the member, and if the core confirms the failure we break it out and rebuild it at our cost. It has happened twice in twenty-seven years and on both occasions the owner heard it from us first.

Please do. An owner with an independent engineer checking steel before pours and measuring work before bills is the easiest kind of client to work for, because nothing is ever in dispute afterwards. We give your engineer access to the site, the drawings, the site register and the test reports, and we will hold a pour if he wants to inspect the steel first — provided he inspects it the same day and not the following week.

Yes, and most of our residential work is built to an architect appointed by the owner. What we insist on is that the structural drawing is prepared or checked by a registered structural engineer before we quote. If your architect has provided architectural drawings only, we will have the structure designed — it is a small cost relative to a single column, and it settles the steel quantity honestly for both sides.

If you have no drawings at all, we can introduce you to architects we work with regularly. You appoint them directly and pay them directly; we do not take a commission on that, and you should ask any contractor the same question.

Ten years on the structure — foundations, columns, beams and slabs — against defects in our workmanship or in materials we supplied. Twelve months on everything else we install: plaster, waterproofing, electrical, plumbing and finishes. Both are written into the contract, not offered verbally.

In practice, what this means is that if something we built fails within that period, we come back and put it right without an argument about whose fault it was. A guarantee from a firm that has been at the same address since 2006 is worth more than a longer one from a contractor whose phone number changes.

Fair wear and tear; anything altered or added by another contractor afterwards; damage from a leak the owner left unattended; work carried out to an owner's instruction against our written advice; material supplied by the owner on a labour-rate contract, other than the workmanship of installing it; and events outside anybody's control, such as earthquake or flood.

We put these exclusions in the contract in plain language rather than burying them, because a guarantee whose limits are hidden is not a guarantee.

Always, on every job, including small ones. The contract states the scope, the rate and how covered area is measured, the payment stages, the programme with dates, the named material specification, the escalation clause, the guarantee and its exclusions, and how variations are priced. The BOQ lists the quantities behind the rate.

Contracts are issued in English, and we go through them clause by clause in Urdu if you would prefer. Take a copy home and read it before signing — we would rather answer questions for an hour now than argue at slab stage.

Owners change their minds — an extra bathroom, a moved wall, better tiles — and that is normal. Every change is quoted in writing as a variation before it is built, showing the addition or omission and its effect on the programme. You approve it in writing, and it appears as a separate line in the final account.

What we will not do is carry out changes on a verbal instruction and present the bill at the end. That is how disputes start. The only exception is a structural change, which we will not build at all until the engineer has approved it, no matter how small it looks.

Regularly in Kasur, Sheikhupura, Muridke and Manga Mandi — near enough that a supervisor gets there and back in a day and our suppliers deliver without a mobilisation charge. Beyond that ring we will consider a job if it is large enough to justify a site camp and a resident supervisor, but we will say so honestly rather than take the contract and run the site from Lahore. A site visited twice a month is a site that will disappoint you.

We do this for several families in the Gulf and the UK. It works when three things are in place: a written turnkey contract with a fixed specification so there is nothing to decide weekly; a relative or an appointed engineer in Lahore with authority to inspect and sign stage certificates on your behalf; and payments made bank-to-bank into the company account, never in cash to an individual.

You get a weekly written report with dated photographs, and a video walk-through of the site at each stage before billing. What we will not do is start work on the strength of a WhatsApp conversation and an advance — for your protection as much as ours.

Yes — added floors, room extensions, structural repair, and full renovation of older houses. The one condition is that we check the existing structure before quoting an added storey: opening two footings and assessing the columns costs a fraction of what it costs to discover the problem after the new slab is poured. Sometimes that check produces an answer the owner does not want, and we would rather deliver it before you have spent money than after.