source for "easy commodity costing?

[kameele]

I do a fair amount of budget estimating for industrial projects, but not often enough to keep up with all the cost changes and in a lot of different locations. I hate to keep calling to get quotes on wire and conduit for each new project. is there a site or e-mail subscription that would give me at least a rough idea of what a variety of commodities might be going for?

i apologize if this has been asked before, but a few searches on the site didn't find anything.

thanks.

 

[tkb]

Trade Service or Epic for pricing services.

 

[dmagyar]

All contractors have different pricing levels off "N" column

All contractors have different pricing levels off "N" column

Kevin, your quandry is also that contractors have different pricing levels based on the amount of discount off "N" column that they have with their respective suppliers , you won't get that information from Tra-ser. Then if you're doing pricing cost estimates around the country it then gets more convoluted. You could use something like RS Means, but I wouldn't hazzard how close they are. Good luck.

 

[ksmith846]

I have my suppliers send me update pricing each month for pipe and wire. They provide a sell price to use for estimating.

 

[Steve Beranek]

I think what he is looking for isn't the pricing, but "Cost Multipliers". Anyone know of a free source for cost multipliers for electrical. I know Marshall and Swift does it for general housing construction cost. I may have something from Craftsman that does it, I'll have to pull that file from my backups, I'll shoot him a PM if the Craftsman info has it.

 

[kameele]

Thanks for the input. I use RS Means for the install times and they seem to work pretty well. but the fluctuation in steel prices actually made the conduit prices in the 2009 book about 40% high. For a while, anyway--the real prices appear to be heading back up.

I think sending a standard list for quote each month (or whenever I start budgeting) is probably the closest idea to what I had in mind. I just wanted to be lazy and have it e-mailed to me. An actual estimating program is a little beyond what I need (or the company wants to buy).

I'm doing the budget numbers, but count on the contractors bidding to do the detail work.

thanks again--I think I'll have to stop by here more often, lots of stuff to learn.

 

[dmagyar]

"Biggest mistake wins"

"Biggest mistake wins"

I remember one of the first things I learned in estimating was that "the biggest mistake wins". I remember from previous jobs I've had where the chief estimator would look afterward at the winning bid and try to figure how to get "there". Trouble is, that no one knows how vaiid the "number" was in the first place, what was missed, what spec's were overlooked and what was under valued.

 

[petersonra]

I do a fair amount of budget estimating for industrial projects, but not often enough to keep up with all the cost changes and in a lot of different locations. I hate to keep calling to get quotes on wire and conduit for each new project. is there a site or e-mail subscription that would give me at least a rough idea of what a variety of commodities might be going for?

i apologize if this has been asked before, but a few searches on the site didn't find anything.

thanks.

The problem with any of the services was touched on by other posters. The price of lots of things is almost random. You might be paying 10 cents a foot for wire that someone else is getting for 5 cents a foot. That amount of variation is not all that unusual, even for commodity items.

Any project of significant size, and these days that might be something pretty darn small by past standards, is being hunted down by all the suppliers pretty ruthlessly.