The equipment is so fast these days the hourly rate has gone up to compensate. I'm fast on cad too so if I charged 150/hr I'd starve.
I usually price potential jobs at a fixed lump sum price. I have a lot of calls where they want a ballpark estimate of the price of the job. I take the square root of the acreage times 850 for low price and times 1000 for high. This method is usually a decent starting point until I can look at other relevant information to generate a lump sum.
Bruce Small, post: 378426, member: 1201 wrote: I calculate that fee based upon $150 an hour no matter what I'm doing
I'm glad to hear you say that, Bruce. That's the approach I've taken, too. I have one hourly rate for my estimates regardless of what I was doing. I haven't heard too many use that, so I wasn't sure if it was a good approach. Knowing that you work that way gives me more confidence. I do think that in most cases (not all) a solo surveyor is worth a single rate. I know what I'm doing when I research. I know what I'm doing when I do the CAD work. I know what I'm doing in the field, whether it's digging holes or collecting points or taping a building. But I keep looking at this like a science experiment. I'm mixing chemicals to see what the reaction will be. I have some hypotheses, but...
Bruce Small, post: 378489, member: 1201 wrote: Wait until you get old like me, then you'll understand. The mind is willing but the body is weak. It just ain't there no more. I still love surveying, though. It's still fun to go out and play in the dirt and solve mysteries. Last week a commercial owner told me he had looked for a corner monument for years and never found it. I swept the various blossoms off the sidewalk with my foot and there was the lead cap in the concrete walk, where it had been for at least 60 years. He was just looking in the wrong place. That made my day.
I helped a friend find monuments at a Baptist Summer Camp in the mountains just as a favor. Emerson Smith (an excellent surveyor) had done a Record of Survey in the 1960s where he found all 8 original GLO corners around the Section then he broke down the Section. There was this one rebar with Emerson's copper sleeve in a non-descript dirt area some distance from the main camp. He had looked and looked and couldn't find it. I didn't figure I would find it either but walked over there with my Subsurface locator, waived around, kicked the dirt and there it was. He was so amazed, how did I do that? Wow, etc. It was just luck, but he would hear none of it.