Architect contract: amount of the ancillary cost flat rate 6%

I thought, however, that all architects have to bill according to HOAI. Did I miss something? There hasn’t been a ruling on the pending case yet, has there?

No, they didn’t have to as far as I know already in the 80s (I don’t know earlier). But architects must have professional liability insurance, and their premiums are apparently calculated according to the fee schedule (as is the case with tax consultants and lawyers). With a low fee, they can therefore feel disadvantaged. In my opinion, this is solvable in practice by always reporting the contract volume to the liability insurer as if HOAI had been applied. Actually billing the client according to HOAI does not necessarily follow from that, in my opinion.

It does not have to be billed according to HOAI.

For our plot, a building permit had already been obtained by the seller.

We wanted changes and then went to the architect, and for the modification based on his work, he wanted €12,000 (strictly according to HOAI)...

In the end, it was a different one for €3,000 net for the building permit, structural engineering, drainage plan, and energy certificate... I don’t know how something like that pays off for the architect, but it suits me fine...

Well, seriously... Unless the architect really has special circumstances, the rest runs relatively easy through a program. In the end, it's a bit of time, the software, and above all the signature that costs money. He doesn't sit down and manually calculate the structural analysis on a sheet of paper.