Contractor bid ( help )

[Baset S.]

Hi everyone,

First I really thank you all in advance and appreciate your time and sharing experiences and ideas that I know that came from hard work and time that worth more then money it self, much appreciated.

As invistor and doing house fliping as a main job I really want to know what are my rights with general contractors.

1- can I ask them to give me receipts on materials they buy ?

2- can I ask them to break down labor hours and the hours pricing ? ( like exactly how many hours he working and how much he pay his subs per hour? and maybe how can I track these hours ??

3- last questions how can I just cross the general contractor and deal with subs only to save money ? And where I can find each one of them on time ? ( yes I have time to manage them )

I’m only asking because every time I try to ask those things to any contractors they flip and argue and tell me they are not required to do this and can’t do it and it will be impossible etc, and they end up twist my arm or fight with them and they tell me no one will do this and I feel I keep losing contractors

I’m from Oregon by the way,

[George W.]

I got some answers for you,

#1 just buy the materials yourself, meet and maintain relationships with salesmans at supply houses. Spend countless hours staying informed and qualified on newest equipment & design trends. Figure out how much time, fuel to go said supply house and sales tax you end up spending then, add a small markup on the material to pay yourself for getting all the materials. otherwise as a business you'd be losing money big time Everytime you go out to buy material. 

#2 you can figure out, not just how many hours you spend on a job but your overhead as a business. Liability Insurance, workman's comp, advertising, shop, truck repairs/fuel, tool expenses, employee benefits etc.. then figure out how many productive hours a week your company can actually work and divide the two to figure out just how much an hour you'd need to generate just to stay in business then try and figure out profits from there. 

#3 is just a poor practice in general. You should never undercut any contractor that you get decent results out of. It'll burn Bridges. Also managing sub contractors isn't always as delightful as it sounds. 

Now if you have plenty of time on your hands maybe you'd be better off just starting your own construction company and finding and maintaining relationships with sub-contractors, supply houses and potential customers. 

Seriously though, there a lot that goes into being a general contractor. Im sure that your current contractor would love to talk about how insane his overhead is every month.