The Replicost methodology is the thing that gets your cost approach admitted in court. Every input, every assumption, every weighting — published, dated, and falsifiable. This is how we get there.
Replicost aggregates four broad classes of source data. Each is sourced, dated, and citable in any report.
BLS PPI series for construction materials and labor — refreshed monthly, applied daily. The macro-level signal.
ENR Building Cost Index and Construction Cost Index. Regional and national series. The industry-standard benchmark.
Material distributor and trade-contractor pricing data, licensed and aggregated. The on-the-ground signal.
Public permit data and direct contractor transaction records, normalized by class and region. The reality check.
ACS, county business patterns, and OEWS wage data — used for regional multiplier calibration.
Marshall & Swift, Boeckh, and Saylor reference points are studied to maintain interoperability across the industry.
The base square-foot cost for a class is built from a hedonic regression on the transaction data, anchored to PPI/ENR series to maintain temporal stability and benchmarked against legacy reference manuals.
ZIP-level cost multipliers are extracted from local wage data (OEWS), permit-cost-per-square-foot transactions, and material logistics costs. Applied multiplicatively to the base cost.
Physical age/life curves are fit from sale-pair analysis and reconciled against IAAO and Marshall-style published curves. Functional and external obsolescence are scoped separately.
The methodology is published. The data is sourced. If you find a methodological flaw, we want to hear about it — published methodologies get better when they’re challenged.
Published methodologies improve under scrutiny. We publish ours so reviewers, opposing counsel, and academic researchers can attack it. The result is a cost approach that defends itself.