What building owners ask assistants about architects, stage by stage

Why does a portfolio answer only one stage?

Because a portfolio answers one question: have you done this before. An owner asks it while choosing a firm, and the page for architecture firms covers what it takes to answer it. The rest of the owner's customer journey comes with questions of its own, asked before any firm is in mind and after one is hired, and a site made of project pages leaves them open. Which of the firm's names an answer uses, and where its principals are licensed, have articles of their own: AI visibility for architects and Architect nearby.

A question the site leaves open can still get an answer somewhere else: from another firm's page, a general article, or an assistant's training data. In our audit of 9,483 small business websites (40 trades, 90 metros, late August to early September 2026), 61.5% had no question-and-answer content of any kind, and half the sites (50.7%) had at least one heading phrased as a question with no answer under it that a machine could isolate. Both figures are sample-wide; we publish no architects-only cut.

One limit before the examples. We have not measured what building owners type into assistants. The questions on this page are written the way an owner might put them and grouped by stage; they are examples, not a count or a ranking, and the ones that matter for your firm are the ones your own clients ask.

Five stages, and where each answer lives on your site

Each stage has a page on a firm's site where its answers belong:

Feasibility: the questions asked before anyone is hired

An owner at this stage has a lot and an idea: can I build this here, how big, and do I need an architect for it at all. The first answer depends on the lot, and the last on the rules where the lot is, which are not yours to state. What you can state is what you do: what your feasibility study checks, what it costs, how long it takes, and what the owner has at the end.

"[Firm]'s feasibility study checks [zoning, setbacks, height, easements and heritage status] for one lot, takes [number] weeks and costs [a fixed fee of amount]; you receive [a short report with a sketch of what fits]." That sentence answers the general question and describes the paid work in the same breath.

For "do I need an architect", say which projects the firm takes, which it sends elsewhere and to whom (a designer, a builder, an engineer), and point the owner to the building department where the site is for the rule itself.

Fees and contract: how you charge, in your contract's own words

Before an owner asks what you charge, they may ask how architects charge at all. Name the basis you use for each kind of project, whether a fixed fee, hourly rates, a share of the construction cost or a mix, and say what the fee covers and what it leaves out, such as consultants, surveys, permit fees and reimbursable costs.

Name the phases the way your own contract names them, since that is the document the owner will sign. If the contract calls them [phase one] to [phase five], the services page uses the same names, each with what it delivers and its part of the fee: "[Phase name]: [what is delivered]. [Share of the fee, or estimated hours]." Two firms' pages can then be set side by side without a translation.

Every figure on the page should be one you would put in a proposal, with the date it was set. A range drawn from your own recent work is a fact about the firm; a share quoted from someone else's survey is not.

Time: approval durations from your own projects, as dated ranges

"How long will the permit take" has no general answer, and a rule of thumb is wrong somewhere. What a firm has is its own record. State it as a range, with the projects it comes from and the years: "[4 to 7 months] for the three permits we took through [municipality] between [year] and [year]." The range says what happened, and the years say how old the evidence is.

Do the same for the firm's own phases: how long design and construction documents took on comparable projects, stated as ranges with their years. Update the ranges as projects finish, and take one down when the rules behind it have changed.

Where the municipality publishes its own review times, link to them beside your range, so the owner sees the rule and your record together.

Construction and changes: the questions after the contract is signed

Once building starts, the questions change: how often will you visit the site, who answers the contractor's questions, who approves a change, what a change costs, and what happens when the contractor finds something no drawing showed. Answered on the site, they also tell an owner who is still choosing how the firm works once the project is under way.

Answer in your contract's terms: what it calls construction administration, how often it puts you on site, how questions from the contractor and change orders pass through the firm, and how extra services are billed ([at hourly rates, or a fixed fee per change]).

Collect the questions your own clients ask

The examples here are a start; your own list is the one to answer, and three records hold it already. First-meeting notes hold the questions owners bring before they know you. Emails hold the ones they ask between meetings, in their own words. RFPs and RFQs hold an institutional client's questions in writing.

1. Go through a year of first-meeting notes, sent emails and RFPs, and copy out every question an owner asked, in their words, with no names or addresses.
2. Put each one under its stage: feasibility, choosing a firm, fees and contract, time, construction and changes.
3. Count how often each comes up, and mark the ones your site does not answer today.
4. Write each answer on the page where its stage lives, answer first and detail after.
5. Add new questions as they arrive, and date each answer when you change it.

Writing to be cited sets out the answer-first shape that gives a passage citability, and the answer-page template shows a whole answer page built that way. Both fit an architect's services and process pages as they stand.