Why Two New Town Interior Quotes for the Same Flat Can Differ by 40%
We've sat across the table from enough New Town homeowners to know exactly how this conversation goes. Someone gets a quote from one interior firm for a 3BHK in Action Area I and it comes in around 14 lakh, and then a second firm, working off the same floor plan and roughly the same brief, quotes 20 lakh, and the client calls us confused and a little annoyed, wanting to know which number is the real one and whether the cheaper firm is cutting corners or the pricier one is just padding the bill.
The honest answer, from what we've seen across 330+ buildings delivered since 2014, is that both quotes can be internally correct and still be almost impossible to compare, because the two firms are often not pricing the same job at all. A 40% gap on paper is rarely one firm being dishonest and the other being fair, it's usually two different definitions of what "complete interiors" even means, stacked on top of different material grades, different labour models, and different assumptions about who absorbs the cost when something on site doesn't match the drawing.
This piece walks through where that gap actually comes from, what to check line by line before you sign anything, and why this matters more in New Town specifically than it does in older parts of the city, where flats have settled and services are known quantities. Here, a lot of the buildings are still fairly new, so plumbing points, electrical layouts, and even floor levels can vary from what the builder's brochure promised, and a quote that doesn't account for that variance is a quote that's going to move the day work actually starts.
What the quote doesn't say about GST, warranty, and who pays when something fails after handover
Almost every quote comparison we sit through stops at the total on page one, and that's a mistake, because a genuine 40% gap can hide inside how the number is billed and what happens after handover, not just what's inside it. GST treatment is the first place this shows up and clients almost never ask about it. Furniture and carpentry billed as a supply-of-goods contract attracts a different GST slab than the same work billed as a works contract with labour and material combined, and firms structure this differently depending on how they've registered their execution model. So two quotes that look identical on the base number can land differently once tax is applied, and a firm that hasn't clearly stated whether its number is inclusive or exclusive of GST is a firm whose 14 lakh could become 16.5 lakh the day the final invoice arrives, which is a worse surprise than any material downgrade because it shows up after the work is already done.
The second blind spot is the payment schedule itself, and specifically how it's structured against milestones rather than dates. We've seen quotes where a competing firm asks for 60% of the total upfront, before a single shutter is cut, with the remaining 40% spread thinly across the rest of the project, and on paper that reads as a normal advance, but it actually shifts almost all the leverage to the firm the moment the client pays. If something goes wrong on site three weeks in, a client who's already handed over 60% has very little negotiating room left to insist on a fix before continuing. A schedule tied to verifiable milestones, carpentry frame-out complete, electrical first-fix done, final finishes applied, keeps the leverage roughly balanced through the project, and it's one of the clearest tells for how a firm expects the relationship to go if something needs correcting mid-way.
| Milestone-based payment | Front-loaded payment |
|---|---|
| Roughly 60-70% released only after visible progress at each stage | 60% or more collected before work begins on site |
| Client retains leverage if a stage needs rework | Client has limited leverage once the bulk is paid |
| Final 10-15% held back until snag check clears | Final balance is often a small fraction, reducing incentive to fix snags fast |
The third piece is warranty and after-sales service, and this is where the real cost of a cheap quote tends to surface, usually eight to fourteen months after handover, well past when anyone's still comparing paperwork. A hinge that starts sagging, a laminate edge that lifts near a window where humidity sits differently than the rest of the flat, a modular drawer channel that sticks, these are normal wear issues in any interior project, and the question is simply who comes back to fix them and on what terms. Some firms offer a written one-year defect warranty on hardware and finishes with a defined response time, and some offer nothing beyond a verbal assurance that fades the moment the final payment clears. At the end of the day, a firm that's willing to put a service commitment in writing is a firm that's priced its own confidence in the execution into the number, and that's usually reflected somewhere in the 20 lakh quote rather than the 14 lakh one, even though neither quote mentions it explicitly.
At Studio Contour we structure payment against five verifiable milestones rather than a front-loaded schedule, we state GST treatment plainly in the quote itself so there's no post-handover surprise on the invoice, and we back carpentry and hardware with a written one-year service warranty that isn't contingent on nothing having gone wrong yet, because the point of a warranty is to cover the thing that actually does go wrong. None of this shows up if you're only comparing two numbers on a WhatsApp message, and that's basically the catch with quote-shopping purely on price, the gap you're worried about on day one is rarely the gap that costs you money on day four hundred.
The design fee structure itself, and the undecided items nobody's pricing yet
Here's a piece of the puzzle almost nobody asks about when they're staring at two numbers on a page, and it's arguably more consequential than the material grade conversation, because it shapes the incentive of the person actually drawing your flat. Design fees get structured three different ways across New Town firms, and each model quietly nudges the designer toward a different behaviour once the project is underway. Some firms charge a flat design fee, a fixed number regardless of how the execution budget moves later. Some charge per square foot of carpet area, which is at least predictable but has nothing to do with the complexity of what you're actually building. And a meaningful number of firms, including several we've competed against for New Town projects, charge a percentage of the total project cost, typically somewhere between 8% and 15%, which sounds reasonable until you sit with what it actually does to the designer's incentive the moment they're specifying materials.
A percentage-of-cost model means the designer earns more when the project costs more, so a firm on this model has a built-in, mostly unconscious pull toward recommending the pricier laminate, the imported hardware, the extra false ceiling detail, not because it's dishonest exactly, but because nobody in that arrangement is rewarded for keeping your number down. We've seen quotes where the design fee line item looks tiny and reasonable in isolation, 1.2 lakh on a 20 lakh project, and the client never connects that the same firm's material recommendations throughout the BOQ are what pushed the total from 16 lakh to 20 lakh in the first place. A flat or per-square-foot fee doesn't have that problem baked in, the designer gets paid the same whether your kitchen counter is basic granite or an imported stone slab, so their only incentive left is actually serving what you asked for and what your budget can hold. This is worth asking directly in your first meeting with any firm, not because percentage-based fees are automatically a red flag, plenty of good work gets done under that model too, but because it changes what questions you need to ask afterward about every material recommendation that follows.
The second piece hiding inside a lot of quotes is the provisional sum, sometimes called a PC sum, for anything not yet decided at the time of quoting. This is one of the most common and least discussed reasons a final bill lands nowhere near the original number, and it has nothing to do with anyone padding anything, it's just how quoting works when certain choices genuinely can't be finalised on day one. Sanitaryware is the classic example, a client hasn't picked a brand or model for the bathroom fittings yet, so the firm puts in a placeholder figure, say 45,000 for the full bathroom fixture set, and moves on. Wardrobe hardware, kitchen appliance allowances, even light fixtures in some quotes, all get the same provisional treatment.
The trouble is that provisional sums vary wildly between firms in how realistically they're set, and this is exactly where a 14 lakh quote and a 20 lakh quote can both be "accurate" on paper while pointing at completely different real-world outcomes. A firm trying to win the bid on price will often set these placeholders artificially low, because a low provisional sum makes the headline total look more competitive, and then the client discovers eight weeks into the project that the sanitaryware allowance covers only the most basic fittings available, and upgrading to anything a New Town buyer would actually want to install adds another 60,000 to 80,000 rupees that was never really "extra," it was always going to be needed, it was just hidden inside an unrealistic placeholder to win the comparison. A firm quoting honestly will set provisional sums closer to what a reasonable mid-range choice actually costs in the market right now, which makes their initial number look less impressive next to a competitor's lowballed placeholder, even though it's the number that's actually going to hold.
| Line Item | Realistic Provisional Sum | Common Lowball Placeholder |
|---|---|---|
| Bathroom sanitaryware (per bathroom) | ₹45,000-60,000 | ₹20,000-25,000 |
| Wardrobe hardware and channels | ₹35,000-45,000 | ₹15,000-18,000 |
| Kitchen appliance allowance | ₹1,20,000+ | ₹60,000-70,000 |
The fix here is simple even if it's rarely applied, ask for the provisional sums to be itemised individually rather than folded into a single "miscellaneous" line, and ask what specific brand or price tier each placeholder assumes, because a number without a reference point is basically a guess dressed up as a quote. At Studio Contour we set provisional sums against a named mid-tier brand and price point for each undecided item, and we flag them clearly as provisional in the document itself, so a client comparing our number against a competitor's is comparing what's actually likely to get spent, not what looked best on the first page.