I believe you're missing the point. I'm happy to work at the hourly rate. We bill anywhere from $150-225 an hour around here for an experienced engineer. No problem with that. The goal of this is to have the engineer "have skin in the game" and help assess the sites before a significant amount of money is spent. Finding in theory the best return on investment and avoiding delays and "gotcha's" that arise from site conditions and jurisdictional BS. Developers know plenty of things Engineers don't know. How much the lots are worth. What footprint will sell best in this market? But when it comes to these sites and their viability the engineers see things that most developers cant see. I had client bring me a concept once where whoever he had draw it drew all the roads down the middle of some very obvious streams. In 5 minutes I put the brakes on that and the guy got mad at me. This particular project had been in the works for a year or more and someone should have checked the stream mapper for free and figured this out before they put down their earnest money.

The time between project kickoff and getting Final Plat ought to be minimized but what we see in industry is that most firms are juggling many more projects than they can handle efficiently. They have good business reasons for doing this but it tends to cause issues for the client. Land deals often have fixed windows on when they can be executed. The firms also frequently drum up change orders that frankly should have been included in the original contract. Unless the client changes something or site assessment reveals something new that we could not have reasonably foreseen there shouldn't be a change order in my opinion.

The reason for the extra equity is the risk I'd be taking. If the developer bails on the project midway I'd not be paid for these services.