Running a fit-out tender in Dubai: scope, visits, levelling

What goes into a fit-out tender pack

The pack is your job described well enough that a stranger can price it without calling you. Every assumption a bidder has to invent is damage to your comparison later.

The scope document

Two to four pages of plain writing, no design language. It should state:

That last line saves the most argument. Loose furniture, IT hardware, security systems, signage and specialist equipment are the usual candidates, and each one of them has been assumed in and assumed out of bids we have seen on the same unit.

Drawings and specification

Bidders price what they can measure. Send the floor plan with partition layout and door swings, the reflected ceiling plan, small power and data layout, elevations wherever joinery sits, and joinery details if your designer has produced them. Add a finishes schedule that names product, brand and reference, with "or approved equal" marked only where you will genuinely accept a substitute. Door and ironmongery, sanitaryware and taps belong in their own schedules.

If MEP design exists, issue it: load schedule, duct layout, sprinkler layout, fire alarm devices. If it does not exist, say so in the pack and give an instruction. A tender with no MEP information and no instruction about it is the most reliable way to get prices that land far apart, because one contractor prices a full mechanical and electrical package and another prices a ceiling with some lights in it. Where you want the contractor to design it, write it as a design and build item with performance criteria: occupancy, equipment heat load, air changes for a kitchen, isolation rooms for a clinic. Our note on where that scope line usually sits is in what sits inside an MEP scope on a Dubai fit-out.

Site photos and as-built drawings

Photograph the unit properly: every wall, the ceiling void with tiles lifted where you can lift them, the distribution board with the cover off, existing air conditioning units, drainage points, the shopfront. Then ask building management for drawings and label clearly what you are sending. Design intent drawings and as-built drawings are different animals, and in older towers the as-builts have been overtaken by three tenants' worth of changes. Contractors know this. Saying "drawings are indicative, verify on site" in writing is more useful than pretending the set is accurate.

The landlord fit-out guide

Put it in the pack. The guide is where the real constraints live: working hours for noisy activity, hoarding standard and whether it needs graphics, the fit-out deposit and what releases it, insurance limits, waste removal routes, service lift booking, the order in which building management wants to see drawings, and the name of the tenant coordinator who reviews your design before any authority does.

It also names nominated subcontractors. Fire alarm modification is the common one, sprinkler relocation next, and in some buildings the entire MEP package belongs to a nominated firm whatever their rate. A bidder who priced your ceiling with his own MEP crew, in a tower that mandates its own, has priced a job he will not be allowed to build. Mall units run tighter still: on Saudi Dates Centre in Dubai Hills Mall the working window, the delivery route and the hoarding specification were all set by the mall before we touched a drawing. The pattern across Dubai malls is covered in how a mall fit-out manual changes your job.

The BOQ template and preliminaries

Issue one spreadsheet, with the line items fixed and the quantity column already filled in from your own take-off. Bidders price rates against your quantities. The moment each contractor builds his own BOQ structure, levelling becomes a translation exercise and you will give up halfway.

Keep preliminaries as a separate section rather than letting them disappear into rates: site supervision, access passes, hoarding, temporary power and lighting, protection of landlord finishes, waste removal, insurance, authority submission and NOC coordination, final cleaning, as-built dossier and handover documents. Ask for unit rates alongside the lump sum. Rates are what you will negotiate variations against for the rest of the job.

• the unit: tower or mall, floor, unit number, area, and whether that area is gross or net
• the handover condition you are starting from: shell and core, a landlord Cat A with grid ceiling and air conditioning terminals already in place, or a previous tenant's fit-out still standing
• what you want built, space by space
• who carries design responsibility after award, and whether the contractor is expected to produce authority drawings and shop drawings
• which authority the building sits under (Dubai Municipality, DDA, Trakhees, or a free zone authority such as DMCC), and who lodges the submission
• dates from the lease: handover, fit-out period, the day rent starts running
• what the contractor is not pricing

Freezing scope before the tender goes out

A scope freeze is a date after which the drawings and the finishes stop moving until bids are back. Without it you are tendering a moving target, and the bidder who started earliest prices a different job from the one who started last.

Before issue, close these:

Provisional sums are not padding. They are the honest way to carry an unknown without letting each bidder guess it differently. Sprinkler head relocation where the existing head count is unverified, a power upgrade subject to DEWA confirmation, fire alarm modification by a nominated subcontractor, builders work where nobody has opened the slab yet: name each one, put a figure against it, and tell every bidder to carry the same figure. A sum you all carry identically drops out of the comparison cleanly. A sum one bidder invents at half the level of another makes the wrong contractor look cheap.

Keep an allowance and a provisional sum separate in your own head too. An allowance covers a decision you have not made, such as an undecided tile. A provisional sum covers a condition nobody can see yet.

Once the pack is out, changes go out as numbered addenda to every bidder on the same day, with a cut-off a few working days before submission so there is time to reprice. A clarification given to one contractor on the phone and not to the others has just cost you your comparison.

• inclusions and exclusions, written as a list rather than implied by the drawings
• the finishes schedule signed off by whoever is paying, not just by the designer
• the split on furniture, IT, audio visual, signage and specialist equipment: who buys, who installs, who coordinates
• provisional sums, each one named with an assumed quantity and a stated basis
• building management comment on the layout: fire exit route, shopfront line, any slab penetration, the kitchen exhaust route for F&B

Running the site visit

A tender visit runs either as one scheduled walk-through with all bidders present, or as individual slots. We prefer slots. A contractor asks sharper questions when his competitor is not standing next to him, and you hear those questions properly.

Access in Dubai takes planning. Occupied towers want names, Emirates ID copies and the contractor's trade licence in advance for passes, and building management usually sends someone to escort. Malls may only allow back-of-house access outside trading hours. In Platinum Tower in JLT, where we delivered the Solvu Solutions and AD Tyres offices, service lift booking and pass issuing ran through building management on their own lead time, so visits had to be slotted around it rather than arranged the night before.

Allow an hour per bidder on a standard office floor, longer when the ceiling has to come down in several places or when a kitchen is involved. Bring someone who can lift a ceiling tile and open the distribution board. A visit where nobody can open anything is a photo session.

Log every question asked on site, then answer all of them in writing to all bidders. Even the ones you find obvious.

What contractors measure and ask on site

What a bidder is actually doing during that hour, and what you should expect to be asked:

On Gashisha and Dr Sheesha on Sheikh Zayed Road, the exhaust route decided the kitchen position. The menu sets the equipment list, and the equipment list sets your extract volume, but the riser decides where that equipment is physically allowed to sit. Any F&B tender issued before someone has traced the riser is a tender you will re-issue.

The questions worth expecting:

Most of the scope clarifications we raise on site come back to two things: who owns MEP, and how much of the existing fit-out is coming out. Both of them move a price more than any finish on your schedule. If the pack is silent on either, expect bidders to answer them differently, and answer them yourself in an addendum instead.

• slab to slab height, and clear height under existing services, which decides your ceiling type and sometimes kills the ceiling height on the drawings
• existing air conditioning: terminal type, chilled water or direct expansion, whether the loop is live, where access panels have to sit, and whether the landlord capacity matches your intended headcount
• sprinkler head positions against the new partition layout, and how many heads move
• fire alarm devices, exit signage, and whether the escape route changes with the new layout
• distribution board location, spare ways, incoming load and the meter position
• fresh air and exhaust risers, and for F&B whether a dedicated kitchen exhaust riser exists and where it terminates
• drainage: invert levels, existing floor cores, grease trap location and whether a tanker can reach it
• floor level variance across the unit, which shows up in screed and in any sheet flooring
• service lift internal size and door width, loading bay hours, and the carry distance from lift to unit
• shopfront line, glazing condition, and in a mall the hoarding anchor points
• who owns the MEP scope, and are nominated subcontractors mandatory
• who lodges the submission with DM, DDA, Trakhees or the free zone authority, who pays the fees, and who chases the Civil Defence NOC
• is there a fit-out deposit, who claims it back, and on what condition
• is the building occupied, and are noisy works restricted to nights
• is construction power available, or is a temporary supply part of the price
• is the outgoing tenant's reinstatement finished, and who carries it if it is not
• what the handover documentation requirement is

Levelling bids so the submissions are comparable

Levelling is the step where you make bids describe the same job. Build a levelling sheet: one row per BOQ line, one column per bidder, and a column holding your own quantity take-off.

Work through it in this order:

1. Completeness. Every line priced, nothing marked "included elsewhere" without saying where.

2. Pull provisional sums and preliminaries into their own blocks, so the measured work gets compared on its own.

3. Compare quantities before rates. A rate that looks sharp against a quantity half the size of your take-off is not sharp.

4. Read the qualifications and exclusions letter line by line, and move every exclusion into the sheet as a gap with your own figure against it.

5. Normalise. Where a bidder excluded something the others included, add your figure to his total so all submissions carry the same scope.

6. Park programme, payment terms, retention and the defects liability period in a separate block. A twelve-month defects liability period is the common market pattern in Dubai, and a bid offering less is cheaper for a reason.

7. Re-check the lowest line items, not only the lowest total. A line far below everybody else almost always means missed scope rather than a better supplier.

Then hold a clarification meeting with the leading two or three bidders, levelling sheet open, and ask about the specific lines where their price sits apart from the rest. A contractor who can explain his own number line by line is telling you something about how he will run the job. For the detail on reading individual submissions once they are in, we wrote comparing fit-out quotes in Dubai, reading BOQs line by line, which picks up exactly where levelling ends.

Timeline and checkpoints for a fit-out tender in Dubai

Dates worth writing into the pack itself:

On a straightforward office floor, a tender that keeps this shape typically runs three to four weeks from issue to award. Restaurants, clinics under DHA and anything with heavy kitchen or medical equipment take longer, because the equipment schedule has to settle before the MEP can be priced honestly.

Set those dates against the lease, not against your own convenience. Fit-out periods in Dubai leases usually start running from lease commencement rather than from the day you appoint anyone, and authority submissions sit after award, not before. Permit turnaround is counted in working days once a complete set is lodged, and a comment cycle restarts that clock. I am not going to put a day count on your building's route, because it depends on the authority, the completeness of the drawings and whether Civil Defence comes back with comments. Which body you are dealing with in the first place is set out in which authority approves your fit-out in Dubai.

• pack issue date, with a named contact for queries and an instruction that bidders do not contact building management directly
• query window, typically the first week, written questions only
• site visit window, typically inside the first week to ten days
• addenda cut-off, a few working days before submission
• submission deadline, a named date and hour, one file format
• levelling period, typically about a week on a straightforward office, longer on F&B and clinics where the equipment list drives the MEP
• clarification meetings, then award and mobilisation

Submission mistakes that break the comparison

What we see wrecking otherwise decent tenders:

Most of these are catchable with one instruction in the pack: price the BOQ as issued, and put every assumption, exclusion and substitution on a single assumptions page at the front. A contractor who will not do that is telling you how the rest of the job will go. What a complete submission should actually contain is listed in what a fit-out quotation should contain.

• MEP priced partially, usually containment and light fittings only, with ductwork, fire alarm modification and sprinkler relocation left out
• finish substitutions made silently under "or approved equal", so one bidder priced your specified tile and another priced something else
• different demolition and reinstatement assumptions, one bidder stripping to slab and another retaining the existing ceiling grid
• preliminaries buried inside rates, which makes the measured work look expensive and the bid look lean
• a lump sum with no unit rates, which leaves you with no basis for the first variation
• exclusions that appear only in the covering letter and never in the BOQ
• provisional sums carried at different levels despite being named in the pack
• a programme that does not match the lease, priced without the night works or the overtime that the real dates need
• authority and NOC fees included by some bidders and excluded by others

When the pack is thin, say so in the bid

Not every tenant has a full design before tendering, and that is normal. When a pack arrives with no MEP information, we price what is drawn, carry named provisional sums for what is not, and put the assumptions on page one so the tenant can see exactly where our number is soft. Ask every bidder to do the same, and the thin pack stops being a problem you discover on site.

If you are putting a tender together now and want the BOQ structure, preliminaries list and scope template a Dubai contractor can actually price against, our office fit-out page sets out how we take a unit from survey to handover, the process page shows where approvals sit in that sequence, and you can send drawings through the estimate request or on +971 56 508 0888 to get our read on the pack before you issue it to anyone else.