Masonry Facade Repair Quoting: Price the Hidden Damage

The honest answer to masonry facade repair quoting is that you cannot price the work until the scaffold is up, so stop pretending you can. Quote it in two stages instead: a fixed, separately priced survey stage (scaffold or access tower, hammer sounding, rake-out samples, mortar analysis, a marked-up elevation), and then the repair itself as a per-m2 rate against provisional quantities that get remeasured on completion. The customer signs a rate, not a fantasy. Anything you find behind the render becomes a priced, approved variation instead of an argument at the end. Firms that quote the survey separately stop absorbing hidden-condition risk for free, and in 2026 that is the difference between a facade job that pays and one that eats a quarter.

Why masonry facade repair quoting breaks the fixed-price model

Almost every other trade job can be surveyed properly before you price it. Facade work cannot. From the ground, with binoculars, on a wall you have never touched, you can see maybe 20 per cent of what matters. You cannot see:

• How deep the mortar has actually failed. A joint that looks like a 20 mm rake-out becomes 45 mm the moment the chisel goes in.
• Whether the render is bonded. A wall that sounds solid at eye level can be hollow above the first lift.
• Whether someone has already repointed it in cement. Hard cement on soft brick means spalled faces, and those bricks now need cutting out and replacing.
• What is behind a bulge: a corroded wall tie, a rusting lintel, a saturated cavity, or nothing at all.
• What the original mortar actually is. Lime, hydraulic lime, cement, or a lime-cement gauge, and at what ratio.

So a single fixed price for the whole facade is a bet. You either load it heavily and lose the job to a lower guess, or you win it and pay the difference yourself.

Price the survey as its own stage

The survey is real work. It needs access, labour, time and often lab analysis. Price it, invoice it, deliver a document.

What the survey stage should contain and what it should produce:

• Access. Scaffold, tower or rope access, priced properly and stated as either included in the survey or carried through to the main works.
• Hammer sounding of the full elevation, with hollow areas chalked and photographed.
• Trial rake-outs: a minimum of one per elevation, ideally one per storey per elevation, recorded with depth in millimetres.
• Mortar identification. At minimum an acid-digestion test on a sample; for a listed or pre-1920 building, a proper analysis.
• A marked-up elevation drawing with measured areas: sound, repoint, hack-off and re-render, brick replacement, structural referral.
• A quantity schedule that becomes the basis of the repair quote.

Charge for it on a day rate plus access plus lab fees, and say so on the quote. Two sentences to steal: The survey fee is credited in full against the repair contract if you place the order within 60 days. And: If you do not proceed, the survey document and the marked-up elevations are yours to keep and to price with anyone. The second one kills the objection that the survey is a sales trick.

Provisional quantities: the mechanism that keeps the quote honest

A provisional quantity is a stated best estimate of an area or length, priced at a fixed rate, remeasured after the work is done, and adjusted up or down. It is not a get-out clause. It is the opposite: it locks the rate and only lets the quantity move.

A provisional quantity line needs four things or it is worthless in a dispute:

1. The rate, per m2 or per linear metre, fixed for the contract period.
2. The assumed quantity, stated as provisional in the same line.
3. The measurement rule: how you will measure it, who measures, and when. For example, joint rake-out measured as elevation area in m2, not as joint length.
4. The threshold: the point at which the quantity has moved far enough that you both stop and re-agree. Ten to fifteen per cent of the line value is a normal trigger.

Write it like this: Deep repointing, rake out to 2.5 times joint width minimum, repoint in NHL 3.5 to matched mix. Rate 1 350 per m2. Provisional quantity 180 m2. Remeasured on completion from the marked-up elevation. Quantity above 200 m2 requires written approval before the work proceeds.

Building a per-m2 rate you can defend

A rate you cannot break down is a rate you will lose in a negotiation. Build it from the bottom. The figures below are a worked structure, not market data: put your own labour cost, your own crew output and your own material prices in, and keep the shape.

Two rules. First, never bury access in the m2 rate. If the quantity halves, the scaffold cost does not halve, and you will have priced yourself into a loss. Access is a fixed sum with its own line and its own weekly extension rate. Second, state the assumed rake-out depth in the rate. If the depth turns out to be 45 mm against an assumed 25 mm, that is a rate change, not a quantity change, and you need the words on paper to make that case.

Mortar matching is a spec item, not a detail

Getting the mortar wrong is the fastest way to turn a repair into a defect claim. Hard mortar on soft brick moves the stress into the brick face, and the face blows. A colour mismatch on a street elevation makes an otherwise perfect job look like a patch. Put these in the quote as named items, priced:

• Mortar analysis of the existing mix. Named lab, named method, named cost.
• Sample panels. Two minimum, 1 m2 each, in a location the client picks, left to cure and approved in writing before the main work starts. Price the panels and the waiting time.
• The mix itself: binder type and class (NHL 2, NHL 3.5, lime putty), sand source and grading, ratio by volume.
• Finish: struck, bucket-handle, flush, weather-struck. Photograph the approved panel and reference the photo in the contract.
• Curing and protection, including the temperature floor below which you stop. Lime work in Sweden is a season, not a year. Build the shoulder months into the programme or price the frost protection.

The sample panel is the cheapest dispute-prevention tool on a facade job. Sign it off and the colour argument stops existing.

Turning discovered damage into approved variations, not arguments

In Sweden this is ÄTA, and the standard consumer contract terms (Hantverkarformuläret, published with Konsumentverket) plus the Consumer Services Act require you to contact the customer and get agreement before doing additional work that was not in the order. In the UK the same thing is a variation instruction; in New Zealand it is a variation under the building contract. The word changes, the rule does not: found it, priced it, agreed it, then did it. In that order, in writing, before the labour is spent.

The failure is almost never the discovery. It is the delay. The bricklayer finds a rusted lintel on Tuesday, mentions it on Friday, and two days of unapproved work have gone in that nobody will pay for.

The variation loop that actually holds

1. Stop at the boundary. Not the whole job, just that area. Move the crew to approved work.
2. Photograph it in place, with a tape or a scale rule in the shot, before anything is cleaned up or cut out.
3. Measure it and price it from the agreed rates. If it is covered by an existing provisional line, it is a quantity note, not a new variation. Faster, and far easier to approve.
4. Send it the same day, with the photo, the quantity, the rate, the total and the programme effect in days.
5. Get a written yes before the crew returns to that area. A tick in an app, an email reply, a signature. Not a nod on site.
6. Attach it to the job so it flows straight to the invoice, with the photo still linked.

This is the loop a job system should run for you. In OdinTask, the crew photographs the damage from the job card on their phone, it stays attached to the job, the extra work goes out for the customer to approve, and the approved amount lands on the invoice without anyone retyping it. The offline-first field app matters more here than it sounds: scaffolded elevations and thick walls are where signal dies, and a variation that does not send is a variation that does not exist.

If the property is a private home in Sweden, the labour on facade repair generally qualifies for the ROT deduction at 30 per cent of the labour cost, within the annual per-person ceiling shared with RUT. So split labour and materials on every line, variations included, or you cannot claim cleanly. And do not assume scaffolding or equipment hire counts as deductible labour: check the current rules and ceiling at Skatteverket before promising a net figure. Outside Sweden, the same question is your VAT or GST treatment of repair versus improvement.

A worked example of the two-stage quote

A 1930s three-storey property, two elevations, soft red brick, patchy 1980s cement repointing, rendered rear.

• Stage 1, fixed price: scaffold, full hammer survey, six trial rake-outs, mortar analysis, marked-up elevations, quantity schedule. Credited against Stage 2 if ordered within 60 days.
• Stage 2, on rates: access as a fixed sum plus a weekly extension rate. Repointing per m2, provisional 180 m2. Brick replacement per brick, provisional 120 bricks. Hack-off and re-render per m2, provisional 40 m2. Lintel and wall-tie repair named as an exclusion, with an hourly rate if instructed.
• The words that save you: quantities provisional and remeasured on completion; rake-out depth assumed at 25 mm, deeper joints re-rated by agreement; structural defects excluded and referred to an engineer; mortar mix subject to approved sample panel.

You have sold certainty about your rates and honesty about the quantities. That beats a fake fixed price, and the customers worth having can tell the difference.