Xactimate Scopes and Real World Rehabs

[J. Cade]

First time poster, long time lurker...

Long story short, I've lined up some investor capital through relationships from my former career as a consultant in the high-end legal field. These people trust my judgment and analysis, and having worked hard to earn that trust, I very much would like to not lose it by giving them bad intel on the deals I am presenting. 

One of my pitch points was my experience as an adjuster (inside property and CAT) and my ability to write an accurate repair scope and keep contractors in line on repair pricing. Being legal types who like to hold you to your written word, if I tell them repairs will cost $XX they're going to expect to pay $XX with very little wiggle room. 

To get to the point, I'd be doing scopes in Xact, which is the gold standard in insurance estimating. Most (real) GC's use it too, but they always insert their own pricing list instead of using Xact's repair prices you download by ZIP. For years I heard contractors say "Xact's price lists are not real world prices." And I don't doubt them, the advantage of writing insurance scopes is the leverage of saying "Do the job for my estimate price or I tell my insured to find another GC." And I'm sure that doesn't fly in this game.

So those of you that do your own repair estimates, are you doing it using Xact or something similar? How far under (or over) have you found it to be with real world rehabbing prices? If it overestimates (as I suspected it might), do you compensate by inserting your own prices, or maybe knocking O&P off the estimate?

I hope I'm not making the rookie error of asking a question that's been beat to death five ways to Sunday around here. Mea culpa if so…