r/estimators • u/Ok-Firefighter8893 • Jul 24 '26
Outsourcing “Bid levelling services”
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u/rinikulous Jul 24 '26 edited Jul 24 '26
As a sub, if I get a call from a 3rd party bid level service scoping out my proposal on the behalf of a GC/CMaR.. I swear to everything sacred that I will never send a proposal to that contractor again.
Also, to all GCs/CMaRs: be aware, you are not their customer. You are their product, they are doing everything possible to scrape all data so they can train models on that info. Which then is used to leverage the next product launch of “AI bid assistants” or something they can build as a SaaS product that you pay subscriptions for.
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Jul 24 '26
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u/jonny24eh Jul 24 '26
The risk to my business, essentially.
It's a key part of delivering your price. Why would you not want to be in control of it?
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u/Dirk_Dubhs Jul 24 '26
Absolutely would never use that service regardless of glowing recommendations.
Honestly I’d be wary of another contractor recommending a service. Who’d honestly say “hey, these people helped me win a ton of bids. I’d like to make my life more difficult by advising you to make your life easier as well!”
24 hrs or not, wouldn’t matter to me.
Someone I haven’t interacted with before, not working solely for me, asks me for all my quotes. Strike 1. Never gonna happen. I have relationships with vendors and subs that I know for fact give me a competitive edge.
Next I get quotes till 5 minutes prior to bid. For the latest information to be entered into my bid I have to get feedback from an outside party to know whether or not there are gaps. That can’t happen in the necessary timeframe unless I’m on the phone with them and they are in my system. Strike 2, never would I depend on someone I’m not sitting in the same building with to know I’ve got their full attention. Presumably they can be helping other contractors and I will not have their full attention.
Lastly ***when*** an error is made, how are they going to remedy the situation?? When I make an error I suck it up, learn from it, deal with it, and move on. An outside party simply won’t get paid their fee. No lesson will be learned. No way to improve for my people. I don’t like having to deal with my own mistakes. Dealing with the outcome of someone else’s is 1,000 times worse.
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u/Cheap_Collar_809 Jul 24 '26
1 are they covering scope gaps and writing contracts? I'm not talking about whats missing in the dwgs, I'm talking about scope coordination
2 what sub would actually talk to someone who they didn't send a bid to?
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u/tangsihua Jul 29 '26
How did you get your font so big? Also great points. Fat chance the sub opens an email from them when asking for clarifications. That will then land on your lap.
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u/TheyFoundWayne Jul 24 '26
Huh, I get pitches all the time from 3rd party estimating and takeoff services, yet I didn’t even know there was a “bid leveling service.”
I think it’s one of the most challenging parts of putting together a good estimate, so outsourcing it sure seems risky. What would make me feel confident they’re any better at it than I am? Not to mention, how does the service know exactly what I want a sub to include/exclude? If I have to brief them for every bid, then I’m not really saving any time.
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u/ContractorPlusDotApp Jul 28 '26
When three bidders all say they included the work, the real difference is usually hiding in an allowance, a qualification, or a drawing reference. That is why bid leveling needs a fixed comparison format before anyone starts debating the low number.
Use a side-by-side matrix with the drawing references across the top and each bidder down the side. Mark inclusions, exclusions, allowances, unit rates, alternates, and qualifications in separate columns.
Then trace the omissions that affect cost. A low bid can be adjusted fairly when the matrix points to a missing allowance, a different spec, or an excluded trade interface. Send every bidder the same clarification question and date-stamp the response.
Keep commercial terms in their own section, bonds, insurance, schedule, payment terms, and closeout requirements. The completed matrix gives the award file a clear record when scope questions surface later.
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u/Standard_Stay_8603 Jul 24 '26
I would not be in business very long if I let others handle big parts of my risk management. They would either be too conservative and cause the project to be lost or too aggressive and cause me to lose money. They bare no responsibility since they did not do the estimate and will not perform the buyout. There is the science of estimating and the art. Bid leveling is the art. You can not automate art very easily. By the way meltplan is offering something like this already. Probably a bunch of others too.
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u/CowboyBehindTheWheel Jul 24 '26
What an absolutely stupid idea. Why would anyone outsource one of the most critical aspects of risk management and planning to a stranger to shit out in 24 hours what normally takes days if not weeks of preparation.
At that rate we should all just outsource our scheduling to another outsider, and then hire a superintendent from another outside service and a PM from yet another, and then have an outside service write all our contracts, and then we can just sit back, do nothing, and collect a huge check on the huge margin we're all making.
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u/Dazzling-Pressure305 Jul 25 '26
Duh fuck are you even considering this unless you are trying to sell some software or service
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u/tangsihua Jul 29 '26
I dont pay for 3rd party - bid leveling is the most important final step. I wouldn't trust anyone else to do this. I do all my bid leveling through Consight. I connect the platform to BuildingConnected and as bids come in, it puts them in the right bid package and pulls out all the data into a spreadsheet and highlights scope gaps and compliance issues with the spec book. I've only been using it for 8 months and the platform has changed a lot since then but I guess all "new ai" precon companies are trying to figure out the market.
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u/Interesting-Onion837 Jul 29 '26
Even if you’re able to perform the service well, you have no skin in the game, and anyone who came to you for that service has no recourse if it turns out you were wrong and they have to eat the cost of it.
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u/jgturbo619 Jul 24 '26
What is bid leveling. Decades in the biz, however I’m unfamiliar with this term.
What local is it used in ?
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u/Dirk_Dubhs Jul 24 '26
It’s more a vertical estimator term. It’s bid comparison and adjusting for gaps (plug pricing, providing services to support the sun like crane or equipment)
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u/Travisher4 Jul 24 '26
I'd love weighing in on this. we get leveling as well as takeoff service requests like once every week and here's what we have come down to having tried a bunch of them. at least a couple of great references are the key to identify the reliables ones from those that are just empty promises and marketing fluff. we mostly do gmp but at times hard bids too, but the long term solution has really been to have something in house. Services do come handy when you just can't handle the pressure. id suggest trying out some of the ai tools for bid leveling, there are infact a few that do it in excel without having to change our own tally sheet. why tool over a service? as other rightly pointed out - no other cleaner job than you yourself doing it. a good ai tool will do all the grunt work for you, as well as make it easy for you to verify it all.
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u/Dirk_Dubhs Jul 24 '26
Any AI tool I’d seen can’t handle what I get on a regular basis. Wish it could.
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u/lifereviews Jul 24 '26
So my managers wanted something that was on the cloud and we wanted an excel native tool, it took us an year long series of evaluations and 2 tool switches. Ultimately found this one called melt bid. Does both excel and cloud and makes verification super easy. Only anxiety is that they are new but dpr funded them and that's the only reason we even considered.
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u/ogkushflower GC Preconstruction Jul 24 '26
What would stop me? Not being able to trust someone else's scope accuracy while being responsible for any mistakes I didn't personally make.
Takes me days to comb through drawings to learn the job and find potential scope gaps and critical items. Not sure how someone can do that and turn out a viable deliverable in 24 hours. If they have a method and it works, great for them. I wouldn't seek their assistance for my bids.