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Factors Pertinent to the Selection of Architectural and Building Services Consultants

Selecting a consultant based on price alone is problematic, as the consultant may not have the necessary capabilities to meet the design, technical, managerial and financial requirements of the project. This is particularly important when the project is large and technically complex. Qualification-based selection (QBS) approach based on prequalification and technical evaluation may help to screen out incapable consultants before inviting them for price competition. However, for many clients, QBS approach for consultant selection is being implemented according to their own idiosyncratic system, and a lack of research effort has been diverted to the subject of consultant selection. As a start of a series of studies on consultant selection, this paper identifies a list of consultant selection factors (CSF’s) based on literature and standard guidelines. This list of CSF’s enables the author to carry out a postal survey in Hong Kong to examine the divergence in the importance of CSF’s between the architectural and building services consultants, and to establish the predominant CSF’s for the prequalification stage.