Charging for garden design instead of free concept plans

The site visit itself is rarely the problem. An hour in the garden, photos, a few measurements, a feel for levels and existing planting - most firms book that to sales, and that is defensible. The expensive part comes next. Drawing a scaled plan, working through two options, compiling a plant list and costing the works trade by trade produces a deliverable with a value of its own. The fee grid for landscape works puts concept design at 16 per cent (HOAI Section 39(3)) of the total fee, and that is for the design, not for the build. The figure is not a price tag, but it does describe a weight: the concept is not a by-product of the quote.

The second cost stays invisible. A finished concept is a document that can be passed on. It travels to the next firm, which then quotes without any design effort of its own and can be cheaper for that reason alone. The firm that did the design has prepared and paid for its own competition. A design agreement does not just sell working hours, it sets a threshold: customers who pay for a concept collect three comparison quotes less often in practice, and customers who will not pay were, as a rule, not an order in the first place.

The third point is capacity. The average order backlog in new build stood at 17.0 weeks (BGL autumn survey 2025) in autumn 2025, based on 668 member firms. A firm with four months of lead time is not selling free capacity, it is selling a place in the queue. That is precisely when unpaid design is most expensive, because it consumes the time the costed sites need. How an enquiry turns into a workable appointment and then into an order is covered in the article on a quote that gets accepted.

The German fee schedule for architects and engineers is not binding for a private garden. It is, however, the publicly available grid that breaks design work into comprehensible stages, and that makes it a usable tool for your own costing. For landscape works, the basic services are divided into nine work stages (HOAI Section 39(3)). The first three are the ones at stake when a concept is given away.

Adopting that structure in your own quotes buys two things. First, a shared language: the customer understands that several stages sit between an idea sketch and a construction drawing, and that they cost different amounts of work. Second, an exit: stopping after preliminary design still leaves something finished in the customer's hands, and the firm has invoiced the effort spent so far. In the object list for landscape works, private gardens and courtyard gardens with representational requirements are assigned to fee zones IV and V (HOAI Annex 11), the top two of five bands that rank the difficulty of the planning task upwards from fee zone I (HOAI Section 5(1)). If nothing else, that shows that a private garden is not treated as a simple case in planning terms.

The credit is the sentence at which resistance disappears. It says: you are not paying for the design on top, you are paying for it in advance. That turns the fee from a new expense into an early instalment, as long as the order follows. Three details make the rule robust: what it is credited against, at what level and within what period. Leave one out and you create exactly the discussion the agreement was meant to prevent.

Two formulations decide the size of any later argument. “Will be credited” without a reference figure is indeterminate: credited against what, the whole construction sum or only the first trade? And “on placing the order” without a deadline works out as unlimited in practice, until someone calls three years later and relies on it. Both belong in figures. The conditions that apply once numbers appear on the page at all are covered in the article on showing prices on your website.

The website decides whether this model reads as self-evident or as an imposition. Naming the design fee only at the end of the site visit is a negotiation. Having it in writing beforehand is information. Four building blocks are enough, and none of them is a design question.

These four building blocks are a matter of wording, not of styling. They work on a plain page just as well as on an elaborate one, and they work only if the formulations match: what the service page promises, the agreement has to deliver. What a website like that costs overall and what makes up the price is covered in the article on what a website really costs; the build itself is handled by the landscaping website.

Finally, the order of magnitude. Nominal turnover in German landscaping came to 11.11 billion euros (BGL industry statistics 2025) in 2025, spread across 19,898 businesses (BGL industry statistics 2025). Private gardens remained the largest order segment at 56.87 per cent, or 6.32 billion euros (BGL industry statistics 2025); public contracts accounted for 21.23 per cent.

In arithmetic terms: private gardens carry more than half of the turnover, and they are at the same time the segment in which design work is particularly seldom paid for. Public clients tender design services and pay for them; in private gardens the same work is frequently booked as acquisition. That imbalance is not a law of nature, it is a habit - and habits change where the first page a prospect reads describes things differently.

The switch costs little and works quickly: one service page, one credit rule, one form, one folder in the vehicle. Anyone reworking the path from first contact to signature anyway will find the framework in the service overview and can settle the sequence in a conversation.