A 5.0
New residential construction
A house on an infill lot, or a rebuild behind a facade the city will not let you remove. The longest schedules on this site, and the ones where entitlement dominates most.
Design End to end 20–40 months
A 5.1 Schedule
How long this actually takes
Drawn at real proportion. If the bars before construction look long, that is the point of publishing them — it is the part of the calendar nobody warns you about.
Schedule New residential construction
| Phase | Duration | Timeline |
|---|---|---|
| Design CP | 24 weeks | |
| Entitlement CP | 52 weeks | |
| Permit CP | 28 weeks | |
| Construction CP | 48 weeks | |
| Closeout | 8 weeks |
- Design
- Entitlement
- Permit
- Construction
- Closeout
- On the critical path
Roughly 30 months, of which about 20 are before demolition or excavation begins. Every phase but closeout is on the critical path. If this chart looks discouraging, it is the most useful thing on the page: a new-construction budget built on an 18-month assumption is wrong by a year of carrying costs.
CP marks a phase on the critical path — one that moves the finish date if it slips. The critical path is marked with an outline and a label rather than a colour, so it is still readable in black and white and to a colour-blind reader. Every schedule on this site, side by side, is on the schedule page.
A vacant lot in San Francisco is rarer than it sounds and almost never straightforward. If it were easy to build on, somebody would have. So the first job on a new-construction project is usually to find out why it is still empty.
Sometimes the answer is benign: an odd shape, a difficult slope, a family that held it. Often it is not: access, soils, a neighbour with a long memory, an easement nobody recorded properly, or a zoning situation that makes the buildable envelope much smaller than the lot.
The other common version of this scope is a rebuild where most of a building comes down and a facade, or a portion of the structure, has to stay. That is not a sentimental requirement; it is a real regulatory constraint in this city, and it changes the project profoundly. Keeping a wall standing while you remove everything holding it up is a shoring problem, a sequencing problem and a cost line that has nothing to do with the house you are building.
Either way, this is the scope where the schedule chart is longest and where entitlement dominates most. Two to three years end to end is normal, and the construction is the last third of it.
On a new build the schedule is not just an inconvenience, it is a line in the budget. Thirty months of loan interest, property tax, insurance and whatever you are paying to live somewhere else is frequently a six-figure number, and it is the number most often left out of a feasibility calculation. That is the whole reason this site publishes the schedule as prominently as the price.
Establish these first
- The lot
- Dimensions, slope, access, and what the zoning actually allows once setbacks, open space and height are applied.
- Why it is still vacant
- Worth establishing properly before you buy, and certainly before you design. There is usually a reason.
- Soils and slope
- A geotechnical report is not optional on most San Francisco lots, and its findings can change the foundation cost by a large multiple.
- What has to be retained
- On a rebuild, which parts of the existing building must stay, and what shoring that requires.
- Neighbours and party walls
- Attached lots mean excavation next to somebody else’s foundation, which is a legal and technical relationship before it is a construction one.
What you receive
Full permit set, structural and energy documentation, certificate of final completion
Plus the things that are not documents: a schedule you can plan around, a written allowance for anything genuinely unknown, and a named person who answers the telephone. See how the money works.
A 5.2 Prices
What this scope costs
Planning ranges, wide on purpose. The full sheet with every scope on it, and a note on what moves a number to the top or the bottom of its range, is on the prices page.
| Item | Description | Unit | Range |
|---|---|---|---|
| E.10 | New house, standard specification Structure, envelope, systems, ordinary finishes | SF | $800–$1,150 |
| E.20 | New house, high specification Bespoke millwork, specified fixtures, complex envelope | SF | $1,150–$1,900 |
| E.30 | Detached guest house Own foundation, own services | SF | $700–$1,200 |
| E.40 | Excavation and shoring, attached lot Next to an existing foundation, engineered | CY | $180–$620 |
| E.50 | Foundation, engineered for slope or soils Piers, grade beams or mat, per geotechnical report | LS | $140,000–$620,000 |
| E.60 | Facade retention and shoring Temporary structure holding a retained wall | LS | $85,000–$380,000 |
| E.70 | Demolition, attached building Selective, with protection to both neighbours | LS | $45,000–$180,000 |
| E.80 | Site utilities and connections Sewer, water, gas, electrical to the street | LS | $38,000–$160,000 |
Units are SF square foot of the area being built, LF linear foot, CY cubic yard, SQ roofing square (100 SF), EA each, LS lump sum. A square-foot rate is for the area of new or renovated space, not for the whole house.
Prices are USD planning ranges for San Francisco residential work, exclude design and engineering fees, city permit and impact fees, geotechnical and hazardous-materials assessment, furnishings and any applicable tax, and assume normal access and no undisclosed conditions. Durations are planning ranges that assume no discretionary review and one round of plan-check corrections. They are published so an owner can plan before spending money on drawings. They are planning ranges, not a bid. Reviewed October 2026. A price and a schedule for your project come from a written proposal against a defined scope. See the disclaimer.
A 5.3 Questions
Questions about this scope
Specific to this kind of project. The general ones — contracts, deposits, allowances, change orders, insurance, who does what — are on the FAQ page.
Why does entitlement take a year on new construction?
Because a new building on an empty lot is the most discretionary thing you can propose in San Francisco. It changes the street, it affects every neighbour, and it is reviewed against design guidelines that are guidelines rather than rules. Notification is near certain, a hearing is plausible, and revisions in response to comment are normal. A year is not a worst case, it is the middle of the range.
Is it cheaper to demolish and rebuild than to renovate?
On construction cost per square foot, frequently yes: new work on a clear site is more efficient than working around what is already there. On total cost and total time, frequently no, because full demolition puts you into the longest entitlement path there is, and because this city places real constraints on removing existing residential buildings. The comparison that matters includes the calendar and the carrying cost, not the square-foot rate.
What is facade retention and why would I have to do it?
Keeping an existing wall standing while everything behind it is removed and rebuilt. It comes up where the city requires that a building not be treated as demolished, which has real regulatory consequences. Technically it means a temporary steel structure holding the wall for the duration of the project, and it is expensive, slow and entirely unrelated to the house you are actually building. When it is on the table, it belongs in the feasibility conversation, not in a change order.
Do I need a geotechnical report?
On most San Francisco lots, yes, and you want one before you buy rather than after. The city is built on everything from rock to dune sand to fill, and the difference between a conventional footing and a pier foundation on a difficult site is measured in hundreds of thousands. That report is the cheapest large piece of information available to you and it is routinely skipped because it feels like an expense before the project is real.
The San Francisco permit path Additions & Vertical Expansion
A 0.0 The other scopes
The other four
Each accented by the phase that dominates its schedule, which is where you should expect the surprises.
Adding to a San Francisco house — out the back, up a storey, or down into the ground floor. The construction is ordinary; the entitlement almost never is.
- You receive
- Permit set, structural calculations, final inspection sign-off, as-builts
A second unit in the ground floor, the garage or the back yard. State law has made the approval path faster and more predictable than almost anything else in this city.
- You receive
- Permit set, separate utility documentation, final sign-off, warranty package
Soft-storey retrofit, foundation replacement, shear walls and moment frames on buildings put up before anybody wrote the rules they are now judged by.
- You receive
- Engineer’s calculations, permit set, special inspection records, final sign-off
Renovating a small apartment building around the people who live in it. The sequence is set by habitability and access rules, not by what is convenient.
- You receive
- Permit set, tenant notices and schedules, inspection records, as-builts
Tell us about the building
What it is, roughly when it was built, what you want to do to it, and whether anybody is living in it. On a first call we can usually tell you which approval path you are on, what the realistic end-to-end schedule looks like, and what about your project is most likely to go sideways.
Trico Construction, LLC · 981 Howard St, San Francisco, CA 94103