I work in Texas (not going to mention which County) and lately we have been doing work for our County and after we send out a proposal for say 10 acres, this client wants us to give out a 'price per acre' for optional additional work that might be within these 10 acres, so they can have a unit cost to go around. Now, if I make the mistake of diving our total fee by 10 acres, they will believe that this unit price will be divided for smaller units.
Let's say this optional additional work kicks off, and they need survey for approximately 0.6 acres (some topo and as-built), obviously THIS price is not going to cover our day by day operation and levels of effort, no matter the size of the tract. Does anyone have a perfect explanation to give out to the client without being offensive as to explain why a unit cost 'per acre' doesn't work for a surveying company? Today we have had the second client ask for this same thing, claiming that they have had work from other surveyors charging less and including a price per acre.
Do you need this work or client?
Maybe you need to add this to the thread from the other day:
What are some reasons that you will turn a client down for a job?
Give the county guy what he wants. Figure out the fee for the gnarliest, most remote, swamp soaked, overgrown acre within that 10 acre tract. Write the contract so that any fraction of an acre is billed at the full acre rate. Therefore, 2.2 acres is billed as 3 acres. Then tell him you can offer a discount if they go with the full 10 acres. (I'm assuming there is no boundary survey involved in your dilemma, just topo and as-built locations).
Tell the second guy you charge what your work is worth. If he disagrees with the worth, he can call one of the other guys. He sounds like a client you don't want anyway.
I don't give prices on a per acre basis. One acre might cost twice what 2000 acres costs, it all depends. It's the type of job that counts.?ÿ
Big fat NOPE!
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pass..
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You might want to explain to your prospective client that there are some expenses to a project that are related to every project, regardless of size, that tends to skew a "price-per-acre" estimate. For example, time to evaluate your current workload to get his/her project in the mix to meet his time constraints; consumable materials (hubs, lath, flagging, paint, t-posts) that would be greater on a 0.6 acre development than on a 10 acre boundary.?ÿ
If it were me, I'd rather have a project based on my hourly billing rates with a not-to-exceed fee specified and the stipulation that if the NTE was approaching fast, work would stop until both parties could re-evaluate the situation and determine how much further the client wants to finance his/her vision.
Does anyone have a perfect explanation to give out to the client ...
Those are my terms. Take them or leave them.....
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... without being offensive ...
OK. Mobilization costs. For example, the client understands that if they hire an excavation company - as an example -?ÿ there will be a fixed cost to move equipment to the site and get the operation going.?ÿ That cost will be fixed and not directly related to the amount of acreage to be worked. The mobilization cost is the same if there is 10 acres to be graded, or a few square feet. You have mobilization costs just the same. You would like to give them a cost for additional work in terms of mobilization plus per unit area. But if they insist on terms that are per area only you must build your mobilization into those terms assuming the worst.?ÿ ?ÿ ?ÿ ?ÿ
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I have no doubt that they have had survey work done cheaper in the past. Prices are up all over. It's been in all the papers.?ÿ ?ÿ?ÿ
If it were me I would provide them with my hourly rate schedule and let them know that the only way I price my services is a fixed fee based on the estimated amount of time I expect to spend on a project or at cost plus. I might even give them a quick worst case scenario of time estimated to do a topo on a smaller tract and compare it to a per acre costs so they can see why you can't price it that way. Sometimes people need to be shown something is a bad idea before they can grasp that it is a bad idea.
Yesterday is a great example of the fallacy involved.?ÿ The final cost for each of four surveys will be nearly identical.?ÿ Acreages involved are: 3.2, slightly over 1.0, 10 and 80.
Last week we went from a 2 lot survey to a one lot survey in the same city on the same day.?ÿ The two lot job was a bitch.?ÿ Probably five times the effort as that required on the one lot survey.
Just tell them that the cost of land survey is only slightly correlated to the area, expalin why, and that anyone quoting them a per acre cost is neither doing shody work or will be out buissiness soon, or both.?ÿ
Just tell them that the cost of land survey is only slightly correlated to the area, expalin why, and that anyone quoting them a per acre cost is neither doing shody work or will be out buissiness soon, or both.?ÿ
EDIT: If you are mostly doing topo, than the price is highly dependent on the area, and I like the idea of estimating the worst cost senerio, and quoting them that.?ÿ
Explain you can do a 10 acre boundary job and a 5 acre boundary job, with the same amount of work involved, resulting in the same cost for each job. The amount of effort needed to complete the job is not necessarily correlated with the acreage, therefore you price by the job and not by acre.
Surveying is not a commodity to be based on units of any kind.?ÿ It is a profession where knowledge of what to do far exceeds the value of the physical effort.?ÿ A doctor giving you an injection of a certain drug takes a matter of seconds to do s, but the knowledge of the condition involved, the appropriate remedy for that condition, the amount of that remedy to inject and telling you what to expect are what the service is all about.
Give them a quote and tell them you didn't build your reputation on what others do.?ÿ Stand your ground.
I can understand why a county might want to have cookie cutter project estimating sheets so they can fill out the forms and make sure the guy doing TPS reports can still have his job.?ÿ I might give them a tabulated worksheet to help determine complete project cost, with acreage playing a part only in the field work portion of the fees.?ÿ It seems you could have a minimum or average amount of property research time, processing of record data, CAD work, post processing and adjustment of data, survey report and whatever else you might typically do for them - maps, etc - that would be in the same range for any size project.?ÿ One or two field work periods could easily be charged per acre, maybe broken into ranges of site accessibility.?ÿ An example might be projects spreadsheeting out for them to something like 3500 for 1/2 acre clear with map and 4500 for 10 acres clear with map.
