Have you ever considered pricing out a home improvement or repair project by activity? How would you know where to begin? How much money can be saved? Would I potentially irritate the contractor I’m getting the quote from? Why would I want to do quote out different parts of the job? There are a zillion and one questions most people have when asked would they quote out different parts of a home improvement/repair job. Most if not all of these concerns are really not valid concerns at all.
Let me ask a few important questions…Do you like to save money? Would you rather have additional dollars to spend on other repairs that pop up? Do you like overpaying people? If you answered yes to any of these simple questions then you are like most people who don’t like to get ripped off and would rather pay fair price for a quality service or product.
To keep this rather simple, when you get quotes from licensed professionals for jobs such as roofing, flooring, patio additions, or any other large projects nine times out of ten they employ a team of people…and in most cases, the license contractors aren’t actually doing the work themselves. So why is that important? It’s important because they’re charging you the licensed contractor rate for parts of the job they are paying general labor rates.
When a licensed contractor quotes out a particular job, he doesn’t have a team of licensed contractors working for him…he actually has a team of contractors he pays less than what he pays himself just like any supervisor. My question to you is why pay someone to supervise work that the average joe could do and who you could pay much less?
For example, let’s say I’m a contractor and you want me to build you a paver patio. Well there are really 4 big stages for this project. Stage 1: Clear the area, Stage 2: Prep the area ie frame it out, Stage 3: Lay the Pavers, and Stage 4: Clean up…Now I’m really simplifying the details associated with building a patio but we’ll stick with these four stages for simplicity. So, let’s say you have the following hours and costs associated with each of those stages.
In example 1, you pay $100/hr which is the licensed contractor rate for each stage, however in example 2, you only pay the licensed contractor rate for the stages that “require” and I say that loosely some type of industry knowledge. In the example below, you could save $2,100 by doing a little due diligence and pricing out the major project stages…that is if you like to save $! Every project is not going to deliver these types of savings but the larger the project the higher the potential savings.
I’m not here to guarantee you savings, but what I am here to do is encourage each of you to do your research…there’s savings out there if you just look for them and it doesn’t require a ton of work!
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