The adjoiner calls....

That's called being in a pickle

Your first client decided it was worth the big fee. This potential client may snort at anything over $100 or might be willing to match the big fee. A lot of conversation is needed to figure that out before making any kind of a number known. In a recording State, once your first job is on file everyone else has the chance to do it for something like the $600 you are thinking about. But, you were only able to do what you did because previous information was available for you to use. Fair is fair.

I would feel the caller out very diligently and then maybe mention how the last job in that neighborhood ran somewhere between $2000 and $2500.

I'm not in a recording state. I would quote it as if I had never been near the place. This is the opportunity to make up for those jobs you thought were going to be a slam dunk and it took you 5 times longer than you expected. It's all business. The more work you do in an area the more information you will accumulate which will increase your opportunity to make a good profit.

Your costs of performing the task of locating and/or setting monuments and making the necessary locations of improvements is not the only factor that should determine the bottom line of your invoice.

Your original fee in the neighborhood set a standard that will be compared among neighbors and when you discount your fee you have cheated yourself.

The more surveys you make in an area, the more liability you have accumulated and not one of the clients/neighbors are getting any less of a service.

My fee would be the same for everyone.

Any discount would have been applied if and when the neighbors pooled together and then made contact for a group rate.

The lucky ones are the ones adjacent to the clients and get it for free if they agree with your work or pay much more if they disagree.

:plumbbob:

Ask them if they have a fence. If they say yes, then tell them that is where the boundary is.

If they say no, tell them to put up a fence, it will become the boundary.

Then charge them $50 for your time spent.

You forgot to say "if in Utah, construct your new fence as far into your neighbors property as you think you can get away with".

Would you say:

You were "On the fence"?

> Then two weeks later the neighbor calls. Not the adjoiner but a neighbor down the street. At this point I could do his job for $600 or less. What do you quote him?
This question is on the licensing exam. As a matter of fact I think it's on the LSIT exam. It's basic ethics.

You can charge the neighbor the same $2500 you charged the first. Or you can charge the neighbor $1550 and refund your original client $950. But no way can you just charge the neighbor $600.

Would you say:

Mooove over, I'm comin' in. 😛

You didn't survey the neighbor down the street property. They're not adjoiners. One never knows what surprises one will find. :-O

Thank you

What is the VALUE of the services you are providing?

They can make a copy of a CD for pennies, yet they still charge $15 or whatever for one.

Also, You cannot get rich by charging hourly rates.

I am often displeased when I lose a proposal because I was undercut. I am downright disappointed when the undercutting surveyor brags that he got the job for half the fee I estimated. He left that money on the table! I am not suggesting to gouge your clients; just to create fees that are in line with the services. Yeah, the solo guy with minimal overhead can have lower fees. But when that guy gets sick, there is nobody else to cover him and there are no additional jobs being completed. You need the buffer, the padding, the financial security.

That's called being in a pickle

> ....In a recording State, once your first job is on file everyone else has the chance to do it for something like the $600 you are thinking about. ...

I disagree a little. If I pull another surveyor's plat from down the street, yes, it's going to help me. In fact that is the only reason I would pull it. But I will be tying in some of his monuments and redoing some of the same work the other surveyor already did. If the first surveyor made a mistake, you're buying into that same mistake unless you do enough work to confirm it (and what if you don't agree with his conclusions?).

I go along with the general (I think) consensus here, that it has to do with the value of getting a survey done. And like someone said, making more money on some jobs makes up for the jobs where you lost your shirt.

Kinda sorta along the same lines. On a somewhat larger economics of scale.
We were hired to perform retracement surveys of several townships. One in particular had basically no surveys since the original GLO, which was a largely fraudulent Benson Syndicate (George Baker, i.e. Baker the Faker) survey of 1882.
Cost a bundle and took a couple of years to perform.
Once done, we started getting calls from all the hippies and society rejects who had bought their little 40 acre slices of hippy heaven out in this middle of nowheresville who wanted their parcels located inside the individual sections. Now that we had established the exteriors of the sections, the breakdown of those was relatively easy by comparison.

Judging by most of those who posted here, I suppose we should have either charged the full township breakdown cost to each of the hippy surveys. Or, taken Norman's take on ethics and given the original client refunds.

Not.

I sleep good at night knowing the hippies were only charged for the effort required to privide them the services they requested. Not that them being hippies had anything to do with it.

Consider a situation where you have done a lot of work in an area over a period of time. Now you have the whole area pretty well tied down, and you can do surveys in the area for a song and still make good money. No ethics problem with that. Except that I'm not sure why you would leave all that money on the table.

In OK the DOT would pay us to break out every section that a piece of Hwy touched. After that you could do any lot in any of those sections for a fraction of what it would have cost before. No problem with that.

I'm not suggesting that the OP refund money to the original client. I'm suggesting that he should charge the second person full price. Do you think Apple feels guilty about charging $500 for a new iphone when making 1 more only costs them $5?

Possibly he could find some justification to charge just slightly less since they aren't immediately adjacent, just to undercut any possible competition. No sense getting greedy. And when the 3rd guy calls, he could increment down again, and so on. But if he charges neighbors drastically different prices the word will get around, at least one person will be outraged, the board will hear about it, and there will be trouble over ethics. It's on the freaking test!

Too many times the situation is one where in order to do the first survey you had to sort out the entire mess. Then you could do virtually any other parcel within that mess in a very short bit of field work time. It might be a subdivision or an entire PLSS section. But, you now know everything that applies as of today. Six months later you only need to worry about those six months because everything prior is known to you.

There is no such thing as fair.

Apple did not charge the first person the full cost of developing the phone. Apple also was fairly certain that they would sell many phones and so could reasonably expect to be able spread the cost of development out over many costumers.

If you know doing the first survey will lead to more customers it may be reasonable to spread the cost out and charge equally; however, if you can not count on this you must charge the first person enough to make a profit. To completely disregard the fact that you have to do substantial less work for the next customer at least has the appearance of being unethical.

Just remember that John Smith will talk to John Doe at some point and discuss what you charged. Might be that the reason the second one wanted a survey was that he thought he could get it cheaper because the first one already paid you to do it. 😉

That's just synergy. Apply rates accordingly but in line with the market.

> Apple did not charge the first person the full cost of developing the phone. Apple also was fairly certain that they would sell many phones and so could reasonably expect to be able spread the cost of development out over many costumers.

No, but that development cost is spread over an expected number of sales. Once the sales expectation is reached, they don't start selling them for the manufacturing cost of the individual phone.

What would another surveyor that hadn't already broken down the section have
charged the hippies?

I don't understand this attitude some surveyors have racing to give away data.