If you run a small or mid-size practice in Sydney, Melbourne or Brisbane, the bottleneck probably isn't winning work. It's getting the documentation out the door without burning your senior people on sheet production.
This is a practical look at how outsourcing that work offshore actually functions — the money, the hours, the standards, and the cases where it's the wrong answer.
The problem isn't design capacity
Practices turning down or delaying projects rarely do so because they can't design them. They do it because the DA set, and then the CD set, will consume weeks of drafting time they don't have.
Hiring is the obvious fix and the hardest one. A mid-level Revit drafter in Sydney or Melbourne costs somewhere in the region of $75,000–95,000 a year before super, leave and a desk. That's a permanent commitment made against a pipeline that isn't permanent. And documentation staff have been genuinely hard to recruit — a large share of small and mid-size practices report difficulty filling exactly these roles.
Local outsourced documentation solves the commitment problem but not the cost one, typically running $45–75 an hour.
How the time zone actually works in your favour
This is the part people get wrong. The pitch for offshore work is usually "they work while you sleep", which sounds efficient and is actually a problem: if your drafting team is fully asynchronous, every ambiguity costs a full day.
India sits four and a half to five and a half hours behind AEST depending on daylight saving. That's the useful bit. Your morning and early afternoon overlap with a full Indian working day, so queries get resolved in real time. Then the drafting continues after your office closes.
The practical shape of it:
- Your 9am–2pm: live overlap. Calls, markups, queries, direction.
- Your 2pm–6pm: drafting continues in India.
- Your next morning: revised sheets are waiting.
A redline sent at the end of your day genuinely does come back by the start of the next one. That's a materially different thing from a 24-hour round trip.
What it costs
Published rates for offshore architectural drafting generally sit between $10 and $25 an hour, depending on what you're actually buying.
The bottom of that range is production drafting at volume — competent, cheap, and requiring you to do the checking. The upper end buys senior review before anything is issued back to you, which usually means fewer revision rounds.
A dedicated full-time drafter — one named person, working only your projects, in your templates — typically starts around $1,800 a month.
Worth doing the arithmetic against the alternative rather than against zero. A $1,800/month seat is roughly a quarter of the loaded cost of a local hire, and unlike a hire you can end it at a month's notice.
Where per-sheet pricing beats hourly
If the work is repetitive and well-defined — townhouse types, apartment unit plans, standard detail sets — ask for a fixed price per sheet instead of an hourly rate.
You get a predictable number to put in your fee proposal, and you stop paying for someone else's learning curve on your second and third identical unit type.
Standards: the thing that decides whether this works
This is where offshore documentation most often falls over, and it's entirely preventable.
Australian drawing conventions are not the US or UK defaults. If your drafting partner is working to AIA conventions and imperial habits, you'll spend your savings on correcting line work and dimension styles.
Before you commit, confirm:
- AS/NZS drawing conventions, including AS 1100 dimensioning and line work
- Your Revit template — title block, view templates, families, sheet naming. Not theirs, yours.
- NCC and state planning requirements for the jurisdiction you lodge in
- BS EN ISO 19650 information management, if your client or project requires it
A competent partner will ask for your template on day one. If they don't ask, that tells you something.
When outsourcing is the wrong call
Being straight about this matters more than the sales pitch.
Early design. Documentation partners document. If the design isn't resolved, you're paying someone to draw a moving target, and the revision rounds will eat the saving.
Genuinely one-off, highly bespoke detailing. The briefing overhead can exceed the drafting time.
Work where you can't share the files. Some client agreements and government projects restrict offshore data handling. Check before you promise a programme.
As a substitute for a project architect. A drafting partner isn't the architect of record. Design intent, statutory approval and professional sign-off stay with you.
How to test it without taking a risk
Don't start with a live project on a deadline.
- Send one sheet. A redline you'd otherwise have drawn yourself. Any competent partner will do this free, under NDA.
- Judge the actual output. Is the line work right? Did they use your template? How many things would you have to fix?
- Run a small paid pilot. A few hundred dollars across a fuller set tells you far more than a single sheet.
- Then commit. Retainer or dedicated seat, once you've seen the work.
The order matters. Firms that get burned almost always skipped straight to step four.
The short version
Offshore Revit documentation works well for Australian practices when the design is resolved, the standards are pinned down up front, and the time-zone overlap is used for live communication rather than treated as a handover.
It works badly when it's bought on hourly rate alone.
Draftitecture is an architect-led documentation studio working with practices across Australia. Send us one sheet and we'll draft it and return it within 48 hours, free and under NDA — or see what we do for Australian practices.