ABSTRACT
Traditionally, quantification and description based on the Standard Method of Measurement (SMM) are not adopted by Quantity Surveyors (QS) in determining the contract price of building services. QS and services consultants often base their price forecasts on experience by way of carefully judged percentage additions to the estimated net building cost as assessed by single price rate method (James, 1999; Buys & Mathews, 2005). Single price rate approximate estimating is unsuitable for building services because the costs of building services are not constant between one project and another. Therefore, this matter requires separate attention when preparing an early budget estimate (Swaffield & Pasquire, 1999; Swaffield & Pasquire, 2000; Oforeh, 2008; Davis Langdon, 2010; McCaffrey, 2011).This situation is the same in the Malaysian construction industry because there is no generally accepted SMM for preparing contract price forecasting model (CIDB, 2009b; Sabaria, 2009; Amuda-Yusuf, et al., 2013).
