Residential Take Off

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Unbridled

Unbridled

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I've been estimating commercial projects now for 20 years, mainly using assemblies as my take off method (on EBM).
I have a residential GC requesting pricing on some new residential projects and have a question for this forum.

Do you residential EC's, take off your projects using assemblies or unit pricing per opening?

Please advise
 
Residential is all over the map from what I see on these forums.

Unit price, square foot, wild ass guess.....

I used unit pricing based on real assemblies I built
 
Residential Take-off

Residential Take-off

cdslotz said:
Residential is all over the map from what I see on these forums.

Unit price, square foot, wild ass guess.....

I used unit pricing based on real assemblies I built
Click to expand...

It would seem logical to me to develop custom assemblies and do a simple quantity- take-off using unit prices for each assembly one developed, add in feeders , SE equipment and Misc items.

I suppose the best thing to do is to try both methods and review historical data after the job has been completed.
 
Unbridled said:
I've been estimating commercial projects now for 20 years, mainly using assemblies as my take off method (on EBM).
I have a residential GC requesting pricing on some new residential projects and have a question for this forum.

Do you residential EC's, take off your projects using assemblies or unit pricing per opening?

Please advise
Click to expand...

EBM has residential take off assemblies. Regardless of how you take things off it still needs to based on science and data. As you describe and that puts you on the same footing as me, I would either not bid them, or I would take a little extra time to use EBM residential assemblies and tweek them for my purposes. A lot depends on how you actually do your commercial. I, for example, usually roll all of my branch circuits, I would do that for residential, I would us something like 15' of 20' of romex. for each receptacle as part of the assembly.

The other thing is, what experience will your installers have with residential. The limited experience I have is that commercial electricians will NOT compete with ropers, in a house, period. So my company for example will need to charge more to do a house than a contractor that is already set up for them.
 
Unbridled said:
It would seem logical to me to develop custom assemblies and do a simple quantity- take-off using unit prices for each assembly one developed, add in feeders , SE equipment and Misc items.

I suppose the best thing to do is to try both methods and review historical data after the job has been completed.
Click to expand...

Strat beat me to it. I used EBM for years, except we didn't do resi.

But I did develop tons of assemblies into unit prices for small commercial/tenant finish. We then kept a spreadsheet with the most common items, and updated the prices semi-regularly.
These spreadsheets were for the really quick unit price, so we could crank out those small bids. All of these assemblies remained in EBM so when we get the job, we could quickly spit out
detailed bill of material.

Just do the same thing, except use the resi modules

EMB is really great for creating assemblies. One of it's real strengths imo.
 
Strathead said:
The other thing is, what experience will your installers have with residential. The limited experience I have is that commercial electricians will NOT compete with ropers, in a house, period. So my company for example will need to charge more to do a house than a contractor that is already set up for them.
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NAILED IT!

That is a good reason to just say no unless you really want to jump into resi work with both feet, you will lose money for a few jobs before it comes together, or your price will be so high that you won't get one.
 
Residential Take-off

Residential Take-off

I gather in residential assemblies, it would be less time consuming to include 15-20 ft of 14/2 or 12/2 for each device (or 14/3 and 12/3). I did look at the residential portion of EBM. It appears that creating residential assemblies is just as easy as tweaking commercial/institutional assemblies.
I just can't but believe the residential market is a very tight market and the competition is fierce. It is my opinion that only residential contractors whose primary market is residential can be profitable enough to maintain it's solidarity year after year.
Perhaps it may be best to stay away from this market and let the residential EC's have it out.
:happysad:
 
Unbridled said:
I gather in residential assemblies, it would be less time consuming to include 15-20 ft of 14/2 or 12/2 for each device (or 14/3 and 12/3). I did look at the residential portion of EBM. It appears that creating residential assemblies is just as easy as tweaking commercial/institutional assemblies.
I just can't but believe the residential market is a very tight market and the competition is fierce. It is my opinion that only residential contractors whose primary market is residential can be profitable enough to maintain it's solidarity year after year.
Perhaps it may be best to stay away from this market and let the residential EC's have it out.
:happysad:
Click to expand...

There is a market and a provider for everything. The HUGE advantage to residential is rough in for 3 days, get paid in two more. trim out in 2 days, get paid it two more. You aren't floating money, 60,90 or more days out, sometimes hundreds of thousands of dollars. Once you get the pricing down, there are only so many variations, so less profit less risk.
 
Strathead said:
There is a market and a provider for everything. The HUGE advantage to residential is rough in for 3 days, get paid in two more. trim out in 2 days, get paid it two more. You aren't floating money, 60,90 or more days out, sometimes hundreds of thousands of dollars. Once you get the pricing down, there are only so many variations, so less profit less risk.
Click to expand...
Thanx Strathead,
Enough can not be said about the significance of cash flow management if you want to be in this business for any length of time.
I certainly concur with turning your money around in a week rather than 30/60/90 days. Ive seen many EC's go down because they did not know how to manage cash flow.
In any regards, thank you for your response.
 
Cash flow doesn't matter if more goes out than comes in (from the jobs, in other words, you lose money).

I've seen guys go under because they took the deposit from the next job to finish the current job.
 
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