About Buildlor
Buildlor publishes indicative commercial construction and tenant-improvement cost benchmarks and build-budget tools for Canadian real estate. Buildlor is not a contractor, cost consultant, or quantity surveyor and does not bid, price, or build work.
Every page on this site answers one question: what would it cost to build this, in this market, at this specification, today. We publish the inputs, the arithmetic, and the refresh cadence next to the answer so it can be checked rather than trusted.
01What we do
Benchmark, not quote
We maintain curated hard-cost bands per square foot for each building type in each market, dated and sourced to published Canadian cost guides rather than to a quote.
Price the whole stack
Soft cost, municipal charges, contingency and escalation are priced as separate lines, so an all-in budget is never mistaken for a hard cost per square foot.
Ship the arithmetic
The cost stack, TI allowance and development charge tools run the same math the pages do. Nothing is gated, and no email is required to use them.
The Buildlor Cost Desk
The Buildlor Cost Desk is the named research function responsible for every published figure: it maintains the unit-rate tables, the development-charge citations, and the escalation series, and it signs off on each revision.
The Data Desk is the byline on every figure-bearing page. It owns four responsibilities, in this order: ingest observations from the cited primary sources without adjustment; apply the published method to derive anything not directly observed; label which of the two produced each number; and hold the review calendar so nothing goes stale silently.
Where a figure is a modelled derivation or a documented baseline seed rather than a direct observation, it is labelled as such on the page itself. We would rather show a weaker number honestly than a stronger one without provenance.
Named individual analyst bios are not published yet. Attributing analysis to invented people would be the fastest way to make everything else here untrustworthy, so the desk carries the byline until real named reviewers are in place.
What we do not do
- We do not bid, price, estimate, or build work, and we take no commission on any project.
- We do not give financial, legal, tax, or investment advice.
- We do not sell or rent user data, and the tools do not require an account.
- We do not let sponsors change a published figure, a ranking, or a page's conclusion. Sponsorship is labelled where it appears.
Not advice — Buildlor is a data publisher. We do not bid, price, estimate, or build work, and nothing here is a quote, a tender price, or construction advice. Figures are indicative order-of-magnitude benchmarks for early budgeting and must be confirmed by a qualified cost consultant, quantity surveyor, or general contractor before you rely on them. About Buildlor