A month of Kestrel costs less than a day of a principal's review.

The example is illustrative. It prices one issue at each phase from the assumptions below; it does not measure what Kestrel finds.

• Hours. Our estimate of the architecture and consultant hours to resolve one egress issue at each phase, from a wall move at schematic design to redrawn and re-coordinated sheets at construction documents, a correction response at plan check, and a redesign plus field change during construction.
• Billing rates. Principal $205, project architect $160, designer $110 and consultant engineer $165 an hour, from a 2025 municipal architecture and engineering rate schedule (City of South Bend, Indiana). Your rates may be higher.
• One correction cycle. Taken as one month: published city plan-review targets run two to six weeks for a first review and about two weeks for a resubmittal (Santa Cruz, Milpitas, Aurora, Piedmont), and the applicant's response adds the rest. The National Multifamily Housing Council's construction survey finds 97 percent of apartment developers report delays, 83 percent of them citing permitting.
• What a month of delay costs the owner. Construction cost escalation at 4 percent a year (the Turner Building Cost Index rose 4 to 5 percent through 2025) plus interest at 8 percent on land and soft costs already deployed, taken as 20 percent of construction cost.
• A field fix. Direct demolition and rebuild at 0.4 percent of construction cost plus a 15 percent change-order markup, two weeks of the contractor's general conditions (8 percent of contract over a 14-month build), and the redesign.
• Rework across the project. The Construction Industry Institute puts direct rework at about 5 percent of total construction cost on average, with a range of 2 to 20 percent. Public-agency studies attribute roughly a third of change orders to design errors and omissions.