Case-based reasoning (CBR) method can make estimators understand the estimation process more clearly. Thus, CBR is widely used as a methodology for cost estimation. In CBR, the quality of case retrieval affects the relevance of retrieved cases and hence the overall quality of the reminding capability of CBR system. Thus, it is essential to retrieve relevant past cases for establishing a robust CBR system. Case retrieval needs the following tasks to obtain appropriate case(s); indexing, search, and matching (Aamodt and Plaza 1994). However, the previous CBR researches mostly deal with matching process that has limits such as accuracy and efficiency of case retrieval. In order to address this issue, this research presents a CBR cost model for building projects that has two-step retrieval process: decision tree and nearest neighbor methods. Specifically, the proposed cost model has indexing, search and matching modules. Features in the model are divided into shape-based and scale-based attributes. Based on these, decision tree is established for facilitating the search task and nearest neighbor method was utilized for matching task. In regard to applying nearest neighbor method, attribute weights are assigned using GA optimization and similarity is calculated using the principle of distance measuring. Thereafter, the proposed CBR cost model is developed using 174 cases and validated using 12 test cases.