In need of a good rehabbing proposal software for a 10 unit building

[Mark Caramanna]

Hello,

I have 10 unit 10,000 square foot apartment building that I have acquired in need of complete gut rehab. The good news is I have a lined up a lender to fund the majority of the project. Currently I am scouring the internet to find a software that offers a professional and very detailed look, that I can present to our lender. Does anyone have a recommendation?

[Giovanni Isaksen]

@Mark Caramanna  two questions: Is this a one off project or will you be doing more rehabs as GC? Have you done and construction contracting before? If this is your first time I recommend hiring someone with GC experience in your type of project to spec out the project and do a rough estimate that you can tighten up with bids from subcontractors and suppliers. Software (or an app) can organize your estimate and make it look professional but it won't tell you what to put in the estimate, and that's the make or break part.

If this will be an ongoing part of your business I recommend finding or building the estimating functions as a part of your accounting system so that you can track costs from job to job. The ability to do a post mortem on each to project will allow you to learn from your mistakes and build an institutional memory of what things actually cost so that estimating will be more accurate going forward and be done more efficiently. By integrating the estimating into the accounting system you will also avoid repetitively re-entering everything into multiple programs.

At the construction company I sold we built the whole system in QuickBooks and could turn an estimate into RFQs, POs, and invoices relatively painlessly and it kept track of all the costs, even the ones we missed on the estimate.