The same 1,500 sq ft house under three contract types, with real final costs. Why the cheapest quote is rarely the cheapest house, and the six things a turnkey BOQ must contain.
Three quotations land on a client’s table for the same 1,500 sq ft house in Greater Noida. Contractor A: ₹2,200 per sq ft, turnkey. Contractor B: ₹2,020 per sq ft “with material”, item-rate. Contractor C: ₹400 per sq ft, labour only, “aap material laa dijiye”. The client, reasonably, picks B or C. Eighteen months later the house has cost more than A would have, and the client has aged five years. We have watched this play out often enough to write down exactly where the money goes.
Turnkey. One agreement, one rate per sq ft of built-up area. The contractor designs (or works to your architect’s drawings), buys every material, supplies every trade, supervises daily and hands over the keys. Government fees are extra at actuals; everything else is inside the rate, which is fixed for the contract period. This is what GharVistaar's turnkey construction is.
Item-rate. The contractor prices each item of work — excavation per cubic metre, RCC per cubic metre, brickwork per cubic metre, plaster per sq m, tiling per sq ft — with or without material. Quantities are measured as executed and billed. It is the government-tender model, and it works when a qualified engineer is measuring; without one, quantities are whatever the contractor writes.
Labour contract. You buy cement, steel, sand, bricks, tiles, fittings — everything. The contractor supplies masons, helpers and carpenters at a per-sq-ft or per-day rate. You also supply the supervision, the scaffolding, the curing water and the decisions.
1,500 sq ft G+1, standard finish, Greater Noida, 2026. Turnkey base is our actual rate; the other two are what clients report after finishing, averaged across projects we have seen since 2023.
| Turnkey | Item-rate | Labour contract | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Who buys material | Contractor, bulk, challans shared | Contractor or client, item by item | Client |
| Wastage risk | Contractor | Client (if client supplies) | Client |
| Theft / short delivery | Contractor | Client | Client |
| Idle labour when material is late | Contractor | Shared | Client pays |
| Daily supervision | Contractor’s engineer | Client or hired engineer | Client |
| Price certainty | Fixed per sq ft | Open (quantities) | Open (everything) |
| Quality accountability | Single party, written warranty | Split — “material was bad” | Split — “material was bad” |
| Client time | Weekly review | 2–3 hours a day | Full-time |
| Best for | Owners with jobs, NRIs, first-time builders | Projects with a qualified engineer on site | Families with a construction background |
Cement bags torn in a leaking store. Sand delivered on the road and half of it swept away by the first rain. Tiles cut wrong because the layout was not planned. Steel cut without a bar-bending schedule, leaving 60 cm off-cuts nobody can use. A professional site plans the cutting and stores the cement on pallets under a tarpaulin; a labour-contract site usually does neither.
A 10-tonne sand truck that carries 8. A cement dealer who sends 49 bags and bills 50. Twenty kilos of steel that leaves the site every night. None of it is dramatic; all of it adds up. On a turnkey site the contractor eats these losses, so the contractor weighs the trucks.
Twelve workers waiting two days because the client’s steel came late are twelve workers you pay for anyway — or who leave for another site and do not come back. Material scheduling is a full-time job and the single biggest hidden cost of managing your own build.
The plumber’s pipe cut into the electrician’s conduit. A wall built before the door size was decided. Tiles laid before the floor slope was checked. Coordination between trades is what a site engineer does all day; without one, the trades coordinate by breaking each other’s work.
We are not saying they are always wrong. If you are a civil engineer, or your father built three houses and will sit on site with a notebook, a labour contract can save 8–10% and you will know every brick. If you have a retired engineer friend who will measure and certify every bill, item-rate is a fair way to work with a good local contractor. The mistake is choosing them because the per-sq-ft number looked smaller, then discovering the number was never the price.
If a turnkey quote has all six, the 5–8% premium over the item-rate number is buying you the 12–20% you would otherwise lose. Read our house construction guide for what a complete BOQ looks like, or drop the plot size into the calculator for a first number.
Two brothers, adjacent 120 sq m plots in Sector 16B, 2025. One chose our turnkey contract at the standard rate; the other chose a local contractor on labour-only at ₹390 per sq ft and bought his own material. Both houses were G+1, about 1,550 sq ft, similar finish. The turnkey house was handed over in month 11 at the BOQ figure of ₹33.3 lakh. The labour-contract house took 16 months. Its owner’s own spreadsheet — he was meticulous — came to ₹36.3 lakh, about 9% more, before counting the 200-odd site visits he made and the two months of rent he paid while it ran late. The single biggest line in his overrun was steel: 4.6 kg per sq ft bought against a design that needed 4.0, because nobody had a bar-bending schedule and the mistri ordered “thoda extra”.
GharVistaar’s standard agreement has all eleven; ask any contractor for theirs before you sign.
Put the three quotes in three columns and the BOQ items in rows: steel kg/sq ft, cement grade, concrete grade, brick type, waterproofing system, plumbing brand, electrical brand, tile brand and size, door type, paint system, site engineer (yes/no), supervision (daily/weekly), warranty (years), timeline (months), exclusions. Fill every cell. The blank cells in the cheapest column are where its price comes from. If a contractor cannot fill the sheet, you have your answer.
Yes — clients often supply tiles, sanitaryware or the kitchen. We credit the BOQ amount for those items and fit what you buy.
You have the BOQ quantity and the delivery challans; weigh the steel on delivery, check the mill certificate, and the contract’s quality clause gives you the remedy. That is why the paperwork matters.
It aligns incentives badly — the contractor earns more when the house costs more. It works only with an independent quantity surveyor checking every bill.
They prefer a single estimate from a registered contractor with stage certificates — which turnkey provides by default.
If you have the time, the knowledge and a family member on site every day, a labour contract with a good local mistri will build you a fine house for a little less. If you have a job, a family and a phone that already rings too much, the turnkey premium is the cheapest insurance you will ever buy: it converts a hundred small decisions and a dozen ways to lose money into one rate, one timeline and one person accountable. Whichever way you go, the BOQ is the contract. A rate without a BOQ is a story, and stories get expensive around the second slab.
We publish our rates on every city page precisely so that the comparison is easy. Put ours next to the other two, line by line. If ours loses on a like-for-like sheet, you should choose the other one — and we mean that.
Owners who have only seen labour-contract sites are surprised by how boring a turnkey site is. Material arrives on a schedule the engineer sets a week ahead; steel is stacked on sleepers under a tarpaulin and cut to a bar-bending schedule pinned to the wall; cement bags are counted in and out of a lockable store; the concrete mixer is calibrated by weight, not by the mistri’s bucket; slump is checked before every pour and cubes are cast and sent for testing. On Saturday evening the client gets a WhatsApp message with fifteen photographs, the stage completed, the stage next week and any decision needed — a tile shade, a switch colour, a window size. Once a month the client walks the site with the engineer. That is the whole relationship. The drama that people associate with building a house — the missing sand truck, the mistri who did not turn up, the electrician who cut the plumber’s pipe — is not a feature of construction; it is a feature of unsupervised construction.
Answer those three honestly and the decision usually makes itself. Then, whichever way it goes, get the BOQ.
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