Quick Tip: Contractor Parties
Here’s a quick tip that should help you cut down on the time you spend getting contractor bids…
On a typical flip, I use 10 or so contractors, which means I (or my project manager) need to make 10 trips to the house and do 10 walk-throughs, before I even purchase the house.
To cut down on the amount of time I spend with my contractors before the work starts, I like to schedule a 3-4 hour period where I or one of my employees plan to be at the house (we’ll have other work to do over there anyway), and will let my contractors know that they can meet me over there any time within that 3-4 hour window to take a look around, ask questions and put together their bids. If I have multiple contractors for the same work, and don’t want them to overlap, I’ll give each a 2 hour window instead.
If you’re like me, doing this should allow you to save upwards of 4-5 hours in driving time and contractor time for each property. For me, over 20 flips per year, that’s nearly 100 hours of saved time!
Hey J Scott-
Thanks for filling me in on how you do your flooring and cabinets.
When you get contractors to prepare bids on your projects how much do you generally compensate each one for their time to prepare the bid?
Hi Ian,
I never pay a contractor for a bid. The one exception is if the contractor has to do a lot of work to diagnose a problem in order to give the bid, in which case I’m happy to pay for a service call to diagnose the problem, which I can then use to get other bids. For example, if the HVAC system doesn’t seem to be working, an HVAC contractor will likely have to run a bunch of tests before he knows what the problem is — I’ll pay for the tests/diagnoses since that’s a lot of work before he can give me the bid.
But, just to give a bid on known work…never!