Construction estimators waste time on unfocused bid requests from GCs

haha, I had a GC screw up like that with me too. They had sent the ITB to over 150 subs. I counted at least 8 div 26 guys, so I noped out of that and anything else they me unless it's 15 minutes from my house. GCs would be livid if every other client was shopping them against 8-10+ competitors, yet that's the shit they want subs to eat.

We get 50-100 rfp’s per week. Most from bid boards like blue book and others and all goto junk. In our experience, it’s a race to the bottom. Example, local GC’s bid coordinator didn’t BCC subs. More than 150 subs, 15 of them I could recognize as mechanical contractors for a coffee shop less that 2500 sqft. Priced them twice early on, no feed back, no relationship. After the email mistake I replied all including the entire list of solicited subs to the let them know we aren’t interested. Please remove us from your list. It was a complete shit show after that. They called 6 months later basically questioning why we won’t price their projects. No thank you, we aren’t here for the practice. GC’s cannot be the only one to make any money, labor is tight. Why would we do it for scratch money? We continue to receive 1-5 a week from them, now the subject says please respond. NOPE! Straight to junk. GC’s need quality subs just as much or more than subs need quality GC’s. No relationship and can’t find the time to call us? NOPE! Every bid we submit is a rifle shot, we bid to win it and perform on schedule, no shortcuts. No spray and pray from us, profit is the game. Revenue trophies are just that.

Yeah, I get the same thing. Actually had two projects this year where the GC came back and asked me if I could hold my prices from two years ago, which I respectfully declined. Long story short I didn’t get the job because I didn’t hold my numbers for two years.

We bid everything to everyone and I think it’s incredibly irresponsible to bid everything both as the GC and EC. But they always convince me to just throw a number together if I have “time”. I think I just needed this post to validate my exit strategy

100%. Obviously, sometimes you'll get incompetent GCs. But from my experience, we deal with inexperienced client PMs who let projects sit in their queue for months, hand them to us late, and then give us budget constraints after we've already collected bids, forcing us to VE items and rebid. The best and final price OP is referring to is an effort to lower the bids so they can fit that budget, but they didn't make it, so delete, delete, delete it is. The biggest problem is that we don't get any extra time.

This happens at owner side too. I've seen some owners basically price check the GC by calling up other contractors (and subcontractors too......) to basically double check any line items that they think is heavily inflated or they want to squeeze the juice as much as possible because upper management is breathing down their throats about why X project is going to be a loss for them. it feels very difficult through the entire chain.

GC estimator here, owner wants to build yesterday, architect doesn’t want to commit to design. Results in 10 million iterations all with asterisks that everything is subject to change. But the owner doesn’t want to pay more than the first number they see (if they even want to pay for it in the first place). I feel like an ass half the time for the shit I’m told to ask my subs to commit to.