It takes a lot of money to do work around your house, and requires a lot of trust. Even though you may not be spending millions of dollars, what you are looking at doing, even smaller projects, will cost you money that you have worked hard to save, and may seem like a million dollars to you. So when choosing who you will trust to do the work, it’s natural to choose the cheapest price. It’s getting the most for your money after all, isn’t it?

Is the cheapest price always the cheapest?

There are a lot of factors to consider when choosing who you want to do your work. What level of finish do you want? When getting more than one quote, is one number way lower than another? What does that mean? Does this person know what they’re doing, or is this their first time? What red flags should you look for?

When planning your project, one of the first questions you should answer is what are you trying to accomplish. If you are planning on doing a rental unit, chances are you are not looking for higher end finishes like you would in your own personal space. This might be a situation where a cheaper trade would work well. The drive for a rental unit, after all, is finding the balance between a low overhead and expense balanced with a maximum return, or being able to ask the highest amount of rent possible for your unit.

Understand What the Market Value is

So what happens when you get two quotes and one is at $25,000 and one is at $60,000? If you don’t know what market value is, this can be incredibly confusing. References are always a must, and a good place to start before moving ahead. A third quote is always helpful as well because it will help you gauge which one is off. If the third quote comes in closer to the lower guy, you can question why the high quote is so much higher. If the third quote comes in on the higher end you can ask why the low quote is so much lower. Maybe he missed something, or maybe he’s desperate for work. Either way, red flags should be raised. So why not take the lowest quote?

I want to emphasize that the lowest quote is not always bad, but at the very least, it should always be closely examined. In my experience, often times the guy with a super low quote is usually struggling to make a living. He’s not making enough off each job to survive and so he is trying to make up by volume. That means when something goes wrong either during or after the project, he is in too much of a rush to get to the next thing to properly address it. That also means he probably hasn’t taken the time to properly examine the plans and will likely miss a lot of the important details. You typically end up either spending a lot more time trying to manage him and inspect his work, trying to make sure he has done it correctly, or hiring someone to come in and fix it. Both end up being extra expenses that often put his price higher than the other competing quotes to begin with.

The process of getting trades and managing them along the way is a difficult one, especially if you don’t know who you’re dealing with. Projects often go over budget and under expectations because of mis-managed trades. A skilled project manager can often save you more money than the fees they require to manage your job, also bringing the trades they deal with regularly and who they have relationships with and a history of good workmanship. Maybe, when it’s all said and done, it’s not worth the headache to manage your project by yourself. Maybe the cheapest price isn’t going to be the cheapest by the end of the job.