Trying to figure out best way to price for multiple new builds
I don’t do tract homes, but I do custom homes, and i price per-device and fixture. That’s the most fair way in my opinion. You need to come up with an assembly price for each device, fixture, appliance, and service. There should obviously be minimums there for overhead and mobilization.
My neighbor is doing a lot of tract homes (southeast USA) and they’re in the $4/ft range under-roof. His clear profit on every house is well under $1k, but they’re doing probably 300-400 houses a year right now. I know guys charging the same thing to do 50 houses a year and it ain’t worth it for that kind of money. You can go be an employee somewhere and make more than that.
If you could get the financial backing to hit the ground running and knock out 150 houses a year than I’d say go for it.
When I first started out trying to wire houses on my own (mid 2000’s) I was at $3.25/ft which was the standard rate here at the time and I made $500 a house. I had no idea what I was getting into. I just got a license and thought I would make a living. It didn’t take long to realize without any sort of scale I would starve to death in residential.
Edit to add… I will say I think i was generally happy doing residential. I enjoyed it a lot, and it was far less stressful other than the fact I wasn’t really making good money. The EC I apprenticed for had spent most of his earlier years in the union doing huge construction projects (high rises, nuclear, industrial, etc…), and told me he was much happier in residential. He had about 30 employees and turned over 100 houses a year. By the time he retired we were doing about 40 houses a year and it was a great experience. He told me it wasn’t worth the stress trying to be too big. I think about that a lot, and now most days I just want to quit and work on my farm full time. Anyway. I don’t want to deter you from what you want to do. But I didn’t grasp exactly what I needed to be doing at the start and just wanted to share my experience.
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