As a Tulsa commercial contractor one of the things you will spend the most time doing will be trying to get work. Most Tulsa commercial contractors will bid projects as a general contractor. Being a general contractor means that you will bid on projects against other general contractors who solicit bids from subcontractors to varying degrees. There are requirements that an architect will place on their project; one is typically a mandatory pre-bid conference. A mandatory pre-bid conference is where the interested general contractors meet usually at the site and the meeting is mandatory for all general contractors in interested in the project.
If you do not show up to the project you will not be eligible to bid on the project. For state job or public jobs in general this is done to measure interest in the project. If not many contractors show it can be cause for postponing the bid of the project. Another way the architect can or will have requirements is requiring that you purchased plans from them or from the print shop holding their plans for a fee. So the architect may list their plans for $150, for instance, and you can make that check out them go to their office pick up the plans and that way you could look at the plans and get a idea of the scope of work and see what all is required.
Now it may seem obtuse to spend $150 just to get plans on a project that you may or may not even bid, but the architect do this so that if you are interested genuinely in the project you will pay the money and it also shows that you have the means to proceed with the project. The architects also put clauses in their bid forms to say things like we will take the lowest responsible bitter and this means that they can basically pick whoever they want and if they’ve had issues with a certain Tulsa commercial contractor or contractor in general and they can exclude their bid.
There have been cases where an owner has been at work maybe on their own or through an architect and the job didn’t go very smoothly or there was a misunderstanding. A misunderstanding could arise from a contractor believing they fulfilled the scope of work and the owner not agreeing that they have and then subsequently bringing in another Tulsa commercial contractor or a contractor in general to complete the project and then trying to recoup losses subsequent to that.
Jobs that are over a certain value and are open to the public or are a public job will have what is called a surety or a bid bond in my experience that bid bond or surety has been 5% of the bad amount and it typically only applies to bids over $50,000. Well so 5% of the bid means that you have to have a cashier’s check written out to the owner or a bonding company issue you a certificate of surety saying they stand behind you. Know what that means is that if you are selected as a Tulsa commercial contractor or the general contractor and you decide to pull your bed and they have to redo the bid or causes some issue then they can either cash or a cashier’s check or they will cash in the bond to your bonding company and in the bonding company will try to come after your assets or the companies’ assets for the difference.
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There is also after the bidding phase a performance and payment bond in process that ensures that the general contractor performs the actual work and pays their subs so the owner and architect or liable for what the contractor does in regard to performance of the work or paying the subcontractors. Now these are important these are important barriers to entry for general contractors because bonds are limited to the assets and work history.
In answer his company is going to want a list of your assets so that if they have to recoup some loss from a bond being cashed in on you then they live in a can and a good solid work history reassures the bonding company that you are good for. This bonding requirement also is why a lot of subcontractors prefer to go through a general contractor. A lot of subs will not have the means to come up with 5% of their bid or a bonding company that they pay a monthly premium to keep bonding their jobs. And we run into a lot of that is construction management.
But the bonding requirement the mandatory pre-bid and plan fees I’ll go towards making sure that the Tulsa commercial contractor or general contractor have the means ability in the will to complete a project or even have the means and ability to bid on the project. It may seem like anybody could bid on the project but he even because we send the project at subcontractors and some contractors bid on it it is not necessarily indicative of a general contractors ability to ensure that they follow through with the bed or the project.
Even if a general contractor is planning on self-performing all the non-mechanical electrical and plumbing work if they have no idea of the process of going through a project and they really have no business bidding on the project even if they are capable of doing the work. These barriers are requirements or a way to search the details out without having to look at each Tulsa commercial contractor individually they just put the process out there and it by itself will sort it out. On more complicated or more regulated jobs this is also done by by paperwork beforehand.
Some jobs require that you have references of similar jobs that you have completed over Hey certain period of time and they may want to go back five years or longer since these projects typically take anywhere from six months to two years to complete.