Contractor Pricing Book
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Gears of War 3 $31.85 Microsoft’s Gears of War 3 is the spectacular conclusion to one of the most memorable and celebrated sagas in video games. Developed by Epic Games exclusively for the Xbox 360, Gears of War 3 throws players into a harrowing tale of hope, survival and brotherhood. In Gears of War 3, players fight on as Marcus Fenix, the grizzled war hero and leader of Delta Squad. Eighteen months after the fall of… |
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Western Digital My Passport Essential SE 1 TB USB 3.0 Portable External Hard Drive (Black) $229.99 Western Digital My Passport Essential SE WDBACX0010BBK 1 TB External Hard Drive WDBACX0010BBK-NESN 1036… |
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Western Digital WD Elements 2 TB USB 2.0 Desktop External Hard Drive $179.99 Western Digital Elements Desktop Hard Drive WDBAAU0020HBK-NESN Hard Drives – External… |
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Western Digital WD Elements 1 TB USB 2.0 Desktop External Hard Drive WDBAAU0010HBK-NESN $129.99 Western Digital Elements Desktop Hard Drive WDBAAU0010HBK-NESN Hard Drives – External… |
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QuickBooks Premier 2012 $227.99 Flexible small businessaccounting with the finance tools for your industryProductInformationQuickBooks Premier 2012 is designed for established and expandingbusinesses with industry-specific tools and reports as well as businessplanning tools for making better decisions. Premier includesallof the features of Pro and lets you choose one industry at startupincluding Contractor Manufacturing an… |
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QuickBooks Pro 2009 [OLD VERSION] $199.95 Small business accounting software that makes accounting easy with tools to organize your finances all in one place. Track sales & expenses. Click to enlarge. Reduce data entry by downloading your bank & credit card transactions into QuickBooks. Click to enlarge. Create purchase orders. Click to enlarge. Gene… |
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QuickBooks Premier 2011 – [Old Version] $339.99 QuickBooks Premier provides specific industry reporting and more than 150 sales, financial and tax reports. QuickBooks Premier has all of the great features of QuickBooks Pro, plus deeper, more tailored reports based on industry. QuickBooks Premier includes customizable tools for tracking inventory, creating purchase orders, and setting pricing levels. It also offers automatic forecasting of fut… |
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RSMeans Contractor’s Pricing Guide: Residential Repair & Remodeling 2012 (Means Residential Repair & Remodeling Costs) $23.55 RSMeans Contractor Pricing Guide: Residential Repair & Remodeling Costs 2012 provides reliable construction cost information for the residential repair and remodeling contractor, featuring total unit price costs for every aspect of the most common repair and remodeling projects. In a format organized for the way you build — from frame to finish, it covers every step needed to complete each task. … |
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Handling and Erection of Steel Joist and Joist Girders: Technical Digest 9 $24.23 One of the PSI approved reference materials for the South Carolina Unlimited Building Contractor exam… |
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Markup & Profit: A Contractor’s Guide $32.50 … |
How to Find a Good Contractor
How to find a good contractor is a question that all homeowners eventually have to answer.
First things first.
Finding a good contractor comes down to your own personal desires for service, reliability, trust, confidence, and satisfaction. You have to decide before you make any phone calls for estimates, exactly what it is you are looking for in a contractor. I guess what I am saying is this:
* It is true that you get what you pay for.
* You also get who you decide on.
* Sometimes you don’t get what you think you’re going to get.
* Sometimes you do get what you don’t want.
* Sometimes you get more than you thought you would get.
Over the years I have talked with thousands of people about their heating and cooling systems, about repairing them, replacing them and installing them. I have met people who are first and foremost concerned with getting the job as cheaply as possible and then want no further contact. I have met people who want the job done as cheaply as possible and then expect to get premium quality customer service and expect top notch super quality installation. I have met people who were looking for the best possible system with out concern for the price, their concern was quality and reliability and they expect great customer service. I have met people who wanted the middle of the road equipment, and had no more expendable money and were extremely cautious about who installs their system. I also met people who, wanted the top brand, but did not want to pay for it.
You have to decide what you want first! Decide on what your priorities are in your search for a contractor before you start talking to them on the phone. What is your primary and secondary objective of the system replacement or installation. What are the qualities of the product that your looking for, the quality of the installation, the quality of the contractors customer service. Are you looking for a contractor who installs the equipment and then has no further contact with you, or are you looking for a contractor who becomes like the family mechanic that every one in your family goes to and has been you family mechanic for years.
I tend to get customers who are looking for someone they can trust and want to recommend to their family and friends. My customers all know that If I don’t answer the phone immediately, that I WILL call them back right away. Just because a company has a lot of people working for it and has a receptionist answering the phone does not mean that they care one bit about whether the system that you bought from them works or not. Some people find out the hard way that a company is only as good as they people who care about it.
With that in mind, here is what I suggest that you could do to narrow down your search. Once you decide what your priorities are in the following categories:
* Customer service
* Brand quality
* Brand durability
* Reliability – equipment and contractor
* Energy efficiency
* Contractor responsiveness
* Contractor customer concern
* Contractor follow up
* Warranties
* Future repair cost
* Environmental impact
* Contractor honesty
You have to understand that just opening the phone book is a matter of luck and it’s a crap shoot. Use these techniques to level the playing field between you and your contractor.
1. You should start the search by contacting at least 5 good friends and ask them who they had install their heating and air conditioning system. Ask them questions about their contractor that you want to hear good answers to. I suggest this list of questions be at least 20 questions long and cover everything from how the contractor responds to phone calls to how well the system heats and cools the home and how good the quality of work was. Did the contractor take care of their home while working? Is the system loud and numerous other things you may be concerned about.
“One thing to note here“ is that while not every one will put drop cloths down and wear booties, this means nothing if the installers have no really good technical expertise about what they are doing. I’d rather have a guy I have to clean up after and not have problems with his equipment, than to have someone who kept my house clean and have to repair their job shortly after it’s installed.
You should ask your friend if the contractor gave them the installation book that came with the equipment and if he filled out the warranty card and mailed it in or if your friend was given operating instructions about the thermostat and the equipment because that’s important stuff. If the contractor did not take time to fill out the warranty card and did not concern himself with giving your friend the operating manual, you have to ask what other steps in the installation process he may have missed because chances are he missed something.
2. You can go to your city building department and ask for a copy of all of the permits pulled in the city in the previous month or two. Depending on the city you might be able to go back a year or more. Usually the city will charge you a small fee for this service and it’s all public information.
Once you get the list, you can scroll through the list of permits and addresses and home owner names. Lets say you decide you’re interested in talking to XYZ company about an estimate. Now you look at the permit list and see all the jobs XYZ company pulled permits on, then when you ask the XYZ company for references you can ask for specific names of customers who have had them do work in the past based on that permit list. You are no longer in the passenger seat about referrals you are dictating who you want to speak to.
Imagine the power you will have when you ask for references and the contractor gives you a list of names of customers who are not on your list and then you ask the contractor to ask the customers that you want to speak to, if its ok to contact them. If he tries to evade the request or makes up some excuse why you can’t talk to the customers on your list, you may have a real indicator that there is possibly something wrong with what that customer thinks about the job that was done for them. If he agrees to contact the customer and get back to you, I would defiantly expect to have an answer within 24 hours on a majority of your requests. I mean don’t give him time to go back and repair a job he screwed up. A reasonable time period is 24 hrs. Sure the customer may be out of the country, but what are the chances of every one on your list being un reachable?
We could assume for sure that once in a while a customer would not want someone else contacting them but the chances of every customer on your requested customer list not wanting to give your contractor a referral are pretty thin.
I would avoid like the plague any contractor who would not want you to speak with a majority of the people on your list of his past customers, based on the city permits pulled. You can do this in multiple cities and get a really good idea about your potential contractor.
You can also ask the city about the permit and if it is completed or not. I believe that you can ask to see copies of the file on the job to see how many correction lists the permit had on it before the inspector gave it final approval. If you find that your contractor is having tons of corrections on each job you look at, maybe the contractor is careless or just not up to date on the latest codes. Every heating and air conditioning contractor may have a correction list here or there, simply because different inspectors look at the same job differently, but if you find the contractor correction lists are 5-10 corrections or more on every job, the contractor may just be careless.
Good Luck
About the Author
John Grisler
Heating Air Conditioning Refrigeration
23 years Field Experience Diagnosing Troubleshooting Repairing and Installing systems
Licensed Contractor since 1991
C-20 & C-36
Field of expertise – Residential & Light Commercial Air Conditionig and Heating
Expertise: High Efficiency residential Heating and Air Conditioning equipment installations and repairs.
Web Site: greenfeetco2.com
Best way to start investing in real estate?
I’m interested in how veterans of real estate investing broke into the market. I’ve read too many books and listened to too many seminars that pin your start on deal-of-a-lifetime type purchases and shady accounting.
Do you think its worth buying, improving and selling a home in a short time? Do you think buying and renting is the better way to go? (Renting seems better if prices fall but carrying several mortgages is as scary)
What kind of financing did you use? Down Payment? (Yes/No/How Much?) How much was your initial investment if you were improving the property? Did you take out any loans to cover your improvements?
I’m in my mid 20’s. I live in the South Shore MA area. I don’t pay rent and incur about $400 monthly expenses. I have a good full time job (+50K), some saved money (+10k) and good credit. I’m very organized, fairly well educated on the subject (a lot to learn) and i have friends who are listing agents and contractors.
Any feedback/contact would be appreciated
Flipping or renting depends on your long term goals. If you are in for a quick, dangerous, profit, then flipping would be the way to go. If you are more interested in possibly retiring early with a good cash flow throughout your retirement, I would buy to rent.
When you research an apartment building to rent out (duplex/triplex/quadplex or a multiunit building), just be sure that your income will be higher than your expense, and you will be safe. It sounds easy, and it really is. Example? Sure!
Lets say you pay 100k for a quadplex on which tenants pay electric and gas.
100k mortgage would be roughly $1400 a month including taxes and insurance. (Try to get them included and then you don’t have to worry about it!)
Put aside a set amount each month in a seperate account for repairs if you need them. Lets go with $150 for this example.
Lets say each tenant uses $40 in water a month, so your expenses would be easy:
$1400 mortgage
$150 repairs
$160 water
_____________
$1710 in expenses
So each unit would have to pay $427.5 a month for you to break even. If you can charge more than that (say $600 a month?) then the extra is profit in your pocket.
When you do your planing on what you can afford, try to keep in mind that all units might not be rented all the time. For my apartments, since they are in a college town, I figure everything with 3 months of vacancy a year on each apartment.
If you are okay on money at the moment, but want to retire early, get mortgages for like 20 or 25 years instead of 30, and pay over your payment every month. If you pay just $100 over on your principle every month, you can pay your loan off up to 10 years earlier.
To purchase properties, I have had great luck buying on contract. For roughly 10% down, I have had owners finance me for up to 5 years before I had to get a commercial mortgage. All the improvements I’ve made to apartment buildings have come from that repair fund I mentioned earlier.
Flipping is more work when it comes to research. You have to find where to get the money, find out how much (exactly) the repairs are going to cost you, and how much the home will sell for. The first house I put a purchase offer in on to flip had 2 months of planning behind it.
Good luck.
Children’s Book Writer / Concrete Contractor
In by gone days all a contractor had to do was give the customer good quality and good service and he/she would be set. Then set back and let your customers do your selling for you. They would tell a friend and then that friend would tell a friend. Your phone would be ringing off the hook. I remember as an Architectural designer some days I would have up to four people wanting to schedule appointments for designs. Those days are long gone! But Fear Not! Click Here For Help
