Although it doesn’t seem as frequent in residential vs commercial, would you prefer to bid against a structured RFP on a residential build-out? From the owner’s perspective, it would help when it comes to bid leveling and a well designed RFP would ostensibly save the builder time when designing their bid (unless they are using a standardized template I guess).
1 Like
That would be great to save time on putting together an estimate… however, I see it as not feasible (old dog, new tricks syndrome perhaps). It may also be my hesitation that I gear our work towards people who are looking for a smooth running project with high quality results and if you listed their concerns … price is not the main topic. There is a whole market of price competing projects of which I rarely find ourselves in competing for projects based on price.
We use standard templates for catching the major costs, but every job has customized lines added for various factors that each job has that we have not captured in doing this line of work for almost 20 years. They always are a good starting point, however, if we don’t capture the fine details/particulars for a job, that would make the difference in making a profit versus not.
1 Like
Thank you for the comprehensive response. Perhaps it would help if I include some additional context here:
-
Part of the goal would be to mitigate the underbidding that is already happening in the market by highlighting unrealistically low bids or areas of a low bid that may just be missing (and will most likely be throwing in later via a change order).
-
We’d be providing this as a value-added service for qualified property owners who are looking to prioritize quality and efficiency over price; that being said, they’d want a fair market price but not necessarily just looking for the lowest bid.
-
Although the RFP would seek to require and normalize the high-level items, builders like yourself would certainly still be able to include more detailed itemizations and additional items that may have been missing from the RFP. In fact, the practice of putting together a really great, detailed bid would most likely compare favorably to those who provide a more generalized bid.
Anyway - curious to know if those caveats would influence how you’d think about bidding against an RFP.
1 Like
I think a client has more tools to filter contractors once they know how detailed their proposals are. They can quickly catch if the contractor has enough experience or not, or even more, they can figure out if the contractors take the time to review plans and list potential problems at an early stage.
I like the effort to mitigate the underbidding, but using the same breakdown can lead to some contractors to either copy and paste proposals without paying too much attention, or even worst, create the false impression that they are very detailed and honest about their bids.
2 Likes
Thanks for sharing the perspective. I think the trick here would be to establish some common baseline for comparison, show the problems that exist in incomplete or unrealistic bids, without taking the artistry out of the bidding process for those that take it seriously and use it as an opportunity to showcase their professionalism and comprehensiveness. I think it is not super simple but definitely an achievable goal.
I appreciate the gratitude, but I think my response was shortened mainly because there is only so much that I really felt I could share openly as this is a public space.
Yes, the detail on your project does help answer the many questions I had in my last response. I do think that a RFP is a good idea.
However, I will say that for customers that contact us and have a very detailed list of what they want is a red flags. This is not to be confused with customers who have detailed architectural plans (construction plans would be utopia!). For those that have a detailed itemized list typically means that a customer is just shopping on price. The current market pressure is partly about price as people are spending money more freely during the current economy. BZ’s budget question helps immensely in weeding out projects that are not realistic.
Meeting with the customer to determine if you like them and they like you is hugely important. Simple concept, often overlooked, but probably the most important factor (on top of time and project management) in a successful project.
2 Likes
Yeah - I can understand why a pre-design or pre-plan RFP would not make a ton of sense; however, we’d be primarily talking about clients who have complete architectural plans and are ready to build!
I completely agree that it would be a big mistake if we were to try and cut the face time out of the equation. We really want to make that the focal point actually - making sure that there is a great connection and trust between the builder and client; and hopefully make the more administrative side of things a bit more efficient.
Thanks so much for all your great feedback. I really respect and appreciate your perspective.
1 Like
I don’t think so. While it may help to compare apples to apples, we prefer to focus on our company strengths and not on just numbers and pricing.
Happy to help anytime.
1 Like