This recession is driving me up the wall! Don’t get me wrong, at least I still have my job, so for that I am thankful. But is it just me, or does every ‘client’ want a bloody discount these days? It’s getting ridiculous. We’ve even started putting discounted costs in our proposals by default, but everyone still wants those discounted!
Is the tiny fraction of budget (and I mean ‘tiny’) that is set aside for visualisation really soooo small or are people just using the recession as an excuse to rip off their suppliers? Does an extra 10% off our (relatively) tiny fee really make a difference? I think not.
It’s driving me crazy because i’m trying to book a short holiday to barcelona and it’s looking to cost me an extra £400 to do the same thing I did 2 years ago.
Yea, that and getting clients to pay their bills ! I’m still waiting for a considerable payment from a sizeable architectural firm 6months after doing the work… they seem to think its acceptable to pay in small installments despite promising to complete the payments before christmas…
I’m very close to starting legal action, but given that they are paying up, albeit slowly, I’m loath to line the pockets of lawyers chasing a payment.
I blame the accountants ! morally corrupt parasites. (yes I know they have a job to do! )
Just out of interest (and OT), has anyone taken a client to court for copyright infringement?
I love it when a client comes along, asks for a conceptual type rendering, not much detail, something to get through planning or whatever, and before you know it they’re nit picking over details you shouldn’t have been bothering about in the first place, getting more than what they paid for. The project drags on, they get x number of revisions. Cheap, tighta$$ idiots. God it winds me up, it makes my blood boil. I feel like telling them to drop dead rather than me do the work for them. Then it’s not my company, that wouldn’t be very smart.
Whilst it would be counter productive, I also feel like giving people exactly what you pay for - a sh1t rendering - if you’re too damn tight to pay for the actual hours it takes me to complete an image you can stuff it. Instead I just grind my teeth and wish bad things upon them and get on with it.
Maybe it’s a bit extreme saying that, but that’s just how I’ve reacted to people totally ripping the situation for everything it’s worth.
Which brings me to something I’ve just thought of - how do you guys prevent clients from taking the mick in terms of changes to an image? Do you have an agreement say, a preview image, and then 1 or 2 sets of changes and that’s it? Stuff like this is hurting us - dragging things out for longer than they should be.
Well its funny you should raise this issue as I’m currently experiencing my worst client yet.
I think the problem is that clients will always want a number of changes. I try not to get to the stage where I have to charge them extra. If it’s a new client, hitting them with costs above the original quote is likely to leave a bitter taste in their mouths. I just take their indecisiveness into account for future quotes. Hopefully if I’ve done a good enough job, and not complained about their changes, they will be a happy client that will return with more work. To me, that’s more important than charging a few extra hundred for some changes.
But, yes, sometimes they overstep the mark and I have to start charging for changes at my hourly rate.
It also depends on the client. Architects seem to expect unlimited changes… and they are easily the least capable of making decisions (how ironic). Media/marketing agencies seem more able to decide on their requirements and stick to them. They also seem happy to accept extra costs for asking for too many changes.
I think you’re right about the new clients, especially nowadays, it’s best not to charge left right and centre, unless they start overstepping.
We deal with some difficult architects also. We create their visual, they realise it looks crap (the design) and then use our visual as a means to create any number of variations on the design they see fit to reach a design that looks good. If they were a half good architect they would have a decent design in the first place, surely that’s what all the training is about?
This isn’t the case with all architects we deal with, some are really easy to work with.
My favourite though, is the multi-millionaire property developer who looks for a bar interior based on the connaught bar in the connaught hotel in london for 250 pounds. Oh my good God. Joe Pesci - Goodfellas. Remember how he punches some guy, over and over - doesn’t know where to stop. That’s what I’m thinking of this guy when he insults me with a statement like that.
Totally agree. In our book, a ‘conceptual’ image should really be charged higher than a photoreal image: at least with a photoreal image, everybody roughly knows what something ‘should’ look like. Conceptual images just drag on forever and you end up with a crap image.
In terms of charging for ammendments, we try to accommodate as much as possible with a view to possibly getting future jobs and then bear in mind the indecisiveness of that particular client by either charging more or working in a slightly different way.
Part of the problem we have in this industry is that it is increasingly getting more competetive. In effect, this means some companies charge far too little for what a job might be worth, either because they are operating from a bedroom, using hooky software, farming out to China or any other number of reasons. This approach undermines the entire industry and means that clients demand more for less. Architectural Visualisation is a critical element in selling an apartment, an office suite, a mixed-use complex etc and should be charged for accordingly (example: a £650k apartment in a complex of 20 should have more than £500 spent on producing an aspirational interior marketing image!).
Architects charge differently and can, in some cases, afford to charge less to get a project through the planning process: a kind of loss-leader. The reason being that if they are successful at this stage, they are likely to be rewarded with a percentage of the total project value when it is finally built. An archvis company doesn’t and can’t price in this way. What we do ‘allows/aids’ a project to get through the planning/marketing process but we get a fixed price for it: we can’t then get an extra, say, 2% of the final project value when it is finally complete. Wouldn’t it be nice if we could? I’d be a millionaire!
It would be great if there was a central ‘body’ which governed how things are charged in the ArchVis sector to prevent this undermining of what is a very important (critical?) componant of the building process.
I do get the feeling that clients/companies, not all, but some, are taking advantage of the “recession”. To ask for discounts just because we are in recession is quite cheeky to be frank. Maybe some of them are legitimate, but I do think they are using todays financial situation to reduce costs..Maybe Im completely wrong and every company is just trying to reduce outgoing costs with a “just in case” kind of attitude…who knows what will happen to that company 1 year down the line.
At the same time though…you dont want to burn any bridges. Keep those clients happy and your work future will be more secure.
In a recession…who doesn’t ? I don’t really like the car analogy, but when I needed a new one now, I would sure deal for the lowest possible price. And not only US or EU car companies are troubled by this. It’s just a sign of these times. The only way to survive is proving your clients you can offer a service they can really benefit from: a service that is very different from your neighbours, a small or big company, a freelancer, another country, whatever. It’s just common business sense: that just now there is a recession should not matter, since people have been and will be doing business in worser times !! Real business men are not the ones that expect clients to come to their offices without asking for the best and cheapest: that is just a legacy of the last decades when times were good !
Wouldn’t you do that if we were not in a recession though? I certainly would. It is difficult to compare such wildly different businesses!
The fact remains that the schemes that *are* going ahead and *will* go ahead command such high prices (yes, even in the midst of a recession) that the costs for good quality visualisation are just a tiny drop in a massive ocean.
I would also say that “real businessmen” get a fair and justified price for their work - that is the difficult bit!
The “difficult” bit is that there are people that can offer the same product for lower prices. And with the current state of the economy you can expect them to go even far lower. Almost every client tries to remind me of that fact, and each time in return I have to remind them that there are other things to consider then just price alone. It also depends on the particular project: I also had projects with the same clients on which I recommended a far cheaper (Eastern) alternative. If you make customers aware that you want to do fair business, both parties can only grow.
Another “difficult” bit is that ArchViz is a very technical profession, for the larger part. In the old days, good illustrators were almost 100% artists and that is why prices did not change very much while there were no computers doing their work. The technical part of this work can be optimized either by working harder or automation which will eventually lower prices even more.
Talking about regulating prices is very difficult in this regard, since this will more lead to a discussion about the effects of global economy and if protectionism is the answer to that…
not to be funny…but I actually had a nice suprise from a whole recession thing today: I went to buy my self a new leather jacket, mine has served me for 11 years and has been wornd and torn and so I desided it was time for a new one. Came to the same store (danier leather) and found that similar jacket which I had bought for 11 years ago now costs about 60% less then what I paid for it then. So happy to buy a new one
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