Getting Bids. Is Not Giving Details of Charges Acceptable?

[Christine Swaidan]

Because of recent rain storms and older units I am in need of some repair work on a couple of units.

I contacted a GC that I found on a neighborhood website. He had a few positive reviews on Yelp. He’s on Houzz, also. He was very responsive. I called him one day and we met at both properties the following day.

One house needs new roof,

2 deck surfaces will need to be removed and resurfaced,

Repair drywall damage,

Scrape ceilings in four bedrooms

Replace 4 windows

Place new weather stripping on four doors,

Install 4 new fan lights (I provide those, he will do electrical).

So the second house is 10 minute drive and by the time we got there he gave me a bid of $39,500 for the first job.

So we did a walk through at the second house and I told him I would like a bid for that work also but I wanted it in writing.

He agreed but said doing the bids takes a lot of time and he charges for writing them up.$150 per bid but he would give me the bargain on $150 for both bids. Ok, I liked the guy, he was prompt, and I know it does take a lot to produce a bid so I agreed to the $150.

When I met him last night I got a list of the scope of the project—what we had decided needed to be done –at the price of $39,500. There was no breakdown of costs. I want to know how much for the roof. I want to know how much for the decks, and I want to know how much for the drywall repairs and windows.

Is this a typical way to bid a project? If I would have known he would not give details I would not pay for the bid—he had already figured out the cost on the 10 minute drive to the second project—which was bid in the same manner.

Am I being taken here or is this—not breaking down the numbers and charging for bids—standard. This is making it very difficult to get competing bids.

[Michael Hayworth]

Why do you care? You have a scope of work, and a price. What value are you going to get out of knowing how much is decking and how much is roofing? Do you ask the car dealer how much is for the engine, how much are the seats, and so on?

I'm a very successful contractor with exceptional client satisfaction ratings. I break my quotes down into major sections, but I don't itemize them line by line. If you're looking to ask me, for example, how much it would save you if you did demo and disposal yourself, I'm happy to calculate that. But good contractor's quotes usually don't look like an insurance settlement with 21 linear ft of baseboard at $x/lf, and painting that baseboard at $y/lf, and a quote ends up with 87 lines of itemized crap, but you're still not really sure whether all those pieces add up to the whole project that you're looking for.

If you get a quote like that, it's almost always a GC who subs out every single thing he quotes, rather than having any of his own employees and sourcing materials himself. They're just taking their sub's line items, adding their percentage, and giving you a list. Those guys can be OK, but they have less quality control than someone who has his own crews. 

Try not to overthink it. Find a contractor you can work well with, who has good reviews, and who can explain exactly what he's going to do for you. Make sure all the bids include the same thing and you're comparing apples to apples, but don't get too bent out of shape if one contractor has a quote that looks like an insurance settlement and another gives you a quote that looks more like mine.

Also, most contractors don't charge for quotes. That may be a sign that he feels like you're going to be a timewaster. It doesn't sound like that's your intent, but all we contractors have to sell is our time & skill, so we're cautious about spending too much time on someone who doesn't seem to be a likely client.

(None of this is to say there aren't contractors out there who are incompetent, or just mediocre, or outright cheats. Unfortunately, we get asked to fix their work on a regular basis. That's why you check references and ask to see current jobs if at all possible.)

Good luck on all this.