Me too. I've made the challenge before, but I can guarantee that if you put a romex crew against a pipe crew on a house, the romex crew would be much faster. Don't forget once you install all that EMT you still have to put wires in it.
For you and iwire:
Thanks for the challenge. Probably bragging is getting me in too deep, but when I did these, we figured a EMT crew of 2 needed one more day to do the house than an ROMEX crew. So at our labor rates, 500 is a little to cheap; let's say $1500, b/c one of the guys has to have a plan in his head. Our expectation of our crews was that a good EMT guy on a frame structure is expected lay out boxes, drill and put up 500' of pipe per day. Some of us could easily do 6-7. I have done 800+ on a 9 hour day in the basement. And we averaged 2000' per house. But on the custom houses we did, it was always really nice to have that pipe and add something else later without too much trouble.
Keep in mind that this was all pre-2008. (and anyway, have any houses been built since then?)
Romex: layout, drill, pull, splice, trim.
EMT: layout, drill, pull, splice, trim.
On EMT we save material running two 3-wire networks in each HR. And we use 40-50% less copper b/c no copper equipment ground. This saves material and labor on splicing with less wirenuts, and easier installs with less box fill problems. Switch-legs and travelers usually run in a pipe that would already be there for a feed.
Well, gotta go try to make some money.