I hoped and assumed that he had his tongue firmly in cheek when he posted that response.
The job now sounds very different in scope than your original post. Also it is very hard to judge the value of a survey that is not in your backyard. Tip O’Neil famously said that “All politics is local”. The same can be said for surveying. I personally wouldn’t make a judgment about what a survey should cost unless I was familiar both with the area and with the local planning regulations you have to follow.
Like I said, we have been in the area for 25 years so we know the ins and outs of most of it. Not to say we don't get blindsided the odd time.
I tell people looking for prices that it is the same as buying a used car, you can check it over all you want but you don't know how its going to work until you get in it and drive it for a while....seems to resonate with them.
Pretty sure Snoop was joking, so was I..;-)
YES
We should be charging proportional to the value of the land.
Alta is not a ski area in Utah
First time I heard about an Alta survey, I got all excited about powder skiing. Turns out there was no skiing at all. A real bummer of a survey and we had to take all these extra shots of stupid stuff. And get this; they wanted us to locate all these things that (supposedly) run underground! They wanted ties to everything, written and unwritten rights show and all kinds of other phrases we didn't understand. When they told us we needed to locate all the parking spaces and other striping we hightailed it out of there leaving the gun still set up.
Then this lawyer started calling and wanted all these certifications and started taking about table a or something like that so I hung up on him and had the phone company block his number.
Be carful what you wish for.
YES
We should be charging proportional to the value of the land.
How much to survey 100 acres of steep, remote land that was clear-cut 10 years ago that I payed 45K for?
It's not just land surveying.
Frontline had a story about cell phone companies. They contract all of their tower work (which is constant due to upgrades) to so-called "turfers" which are large corporations which then contract with a general contractor who subs the work. Apparently the work gets sub'd down 3 or 4 levels to the contractor which does the actual work. By the time all of the middlemen get their cut there isn't much time or money left to actually do the job.
They are hiring young people (around 20) to do the actual work for about $10 per hour. There has been a lot of fatal accidents (falls mostly) because they are using fall protection which is too old or they just don't use it in their hurry. When someone dies OSHA can only go after the actual sub who doesn't have any money, anyway.
The slimy SOBs up the food chain have themselves well shielded from any liability and they just disavow responsibility. The whole system is setup to hurry the work for cheap while shielding the corporations from liability so they just wash their hands of any responsibility.
Be carful what you wish for.
> How much to survey 100 acres of steep, remote land that was clear-cut 10 years ago that I payed 45K for?
How much are you willing to spend?
😉
At what ratio, spledeus??
Its just the opposite around here.
the ratio should vary depending on area
also the level of service should increase with a project
the multi-million dollar mcmansion should have golden monuments set at a golden fee
the normal house should have normal monuments set at a normal fee
the hilly overgrown mess? that's like the title mess of owner unknown land. in those cases, the rate should vary from a standard subdivision or lot line staking.
i just got back from one -staking the lot line on land courted property
i have traverse on one side and had to roam to the other side where i found a 1' bust in the plan. the 2006 low ball survey plan. had they done the project for the correct fee, they could have added details to the monuments (land court typically holds math above monuments) and i could have known there was an issue that was resolved. instead, they showed all the monuments at the corners without detail and i had to scratch my head when things did not check.
what benefit was there to the shoddy work? the subdivider passed the problems onto the homeowner rather than do the work the right way. given the land court red tape, it is far better to fix a plan during a subdivision than try to fix it later.
We know why. Surveyors in general lack formal education in business. Many do not even know what their true costs are. I have heard explanations of cost and time that do not include office time, travel time, overhead, etc. Typically, I hear things like, " I only have 2 hours of field work in it and I charged $100 because gramma Jones over there can't afford it." This despite the fact that gramma drives a Lexus and lives in an oceanfront home. They dont understand cost or value to a client.I believe some of this is changing with the push towards more stringent educational requirements but change comes slow.
Alta is not a ski area in Utah
Is this when you were taught the stretching method?!?
I have enough...
gray hair. I just don't worry about it anymore because there is nothing I can do about what some other surveyors charge. I may not understand how they can do the work for what they are proposing but that is their concern not mine. I am sure I have been accused of being the lowballer more than once. I wish them luck and move on to the next proposal.
I have to chime in on this one.....
I bid a big roadway staking job $18,500
Client calls me to come pick up the plans (200 pages or so). Yea Ha!!!
When I get there he shows me a bid from a company that
is a 2 hour drive from the site. They were at $9,500.
He gave me the work because he knew something was wrong with the
other bid and they would have not been able to provide the service needed.
This job is 1 mile from my house. 🙂
Alta is not a ski area in Utah
Table A is ALWAYS part of an ALTA/ACSM Land Title Survey... Any PLS should know all about it. Otherwise, I don't know how they even get a license.
We are hired by the largest phone company in the state to survey their cell towers (often more than once). They pay the going rate and are grateful to get a good product at a reasonable timeline. That is why they keep coming back.
We had a big local downturn recently, where several firms from Denver bid projects in SE Colorado (often involving 3 hours/day of travel time) for roughly half of what we could do them for (as a local firm, with little travel time). Some of these jobs were several-years long. Now things have gone on an upswing, and we're getting more-profitable jobs, while those Denver firms are still locked into the gigs they underbid, and are losing money on them.
Net result is most Denver firms have stopped bidding down here, since they're still losing money on jobs they're now locked into, and don't have the manpower to bid the new more-profitable jobs because their personnel is tied up in their under-bid jobs. The "low-balling" of remote jobs can really bite you.
Guess that goes back to some earlier comments, about how bad the business-sense is for a lot of Survey companies. I can understand it to some extent... If you build a team you like and trust, and feel responsible for, you don't want to lose the people in a downturn. But it can lead to some really bad long-term decisions, from the business perspective.
:good:
Lowballers - Seth's Blog
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