Every cost figure on this platform carries a publisher, an edition and a page. That isn't decoration — it's the whole methodology. This article explains, in plain language, what we quote, what we refuse to print, and why.
What we quote
We reproduce published cost guides as printed. The corpus is built from named publishers — Altus Group's Canadian Cost Guide and Rider Levett Bucknall's quarterly report among them — and every row stores the source name, edition, page and URL alongside the band. When you see a range on Ridgeplate, you are looking at what that guide printed, with the citation attached, so you can open the source and check us.
The corpus currently holds 877 active published benchmark rows. That number changes as guides are added or superseded, so this article reads it live rather than printing a figure that would be stale next month.
What we never do
- Never average two publishers into one number. Where two guides cover the same cell, you see both bands side by side, with the disagreement named.
- Never invent a midpoint. A range's middle is not data; nobody measured it. If you need a point estimate, the printed band plus your own specification judgement is more honest than a number we fabricated.
- Never subdivide a printed band into tiers the guide doesn't print. If the publisher prints one band for a building type, we serve one band.
- Never fall back to another country, another metro, or a national figure when your cell is uncovered. A nearby city's number is not your city's number.
What happens when no guide covers your cell
We refuse — and charge nothing. A worked example: ask for a low-rise purpose-built rental band in Halifax. The corpus prints mid-rise and high-rise apartment rows for Halifax, but no low-rise row, and the printed bands state their own height coverage. Serving you the mid-rise band relabelled as low-rise would be derivation dressed as quotation. So the answer you get is a plain statement that no source covers the cell, with the nearest covered cells shown for context — and no charge.
Composition is quotation, not derivation
One multiplication is allowed: a printed rate times a quantity you supplied stays quotation. If the guide prints a band per square foot and you tell us your building is a given size, scaling the band by your area is arithmetic on cited figures, not a new figure. What we won't do is multiply by factors of our own — no regional modifiers, no drift multipliers, no index adjustments presented as the price. Where an escalation index is relevant, it renders as its own labelled line beside the printed band, citing the published index, never folded into it.
Confidence, in three rungs
- One published source covers the cell.
- Two or more published sources cover the cell — shown side by side, with overlap or disagreement stated.
- Comp-backed — supported by comparable project data, with the count of comparables stated on the figure.
There is deliberately no fourth rung for an AI-estimated figure. Models classify and route; the numbers come from documents with a publisher's name on them. That is the entire trick, and it isn't a trick: show the figure, show the source, and refuse when there isn't one.