heat pump quote - is this reasonable?
this is in ulster county, Rycor.
randolph
in General Discussion 2 years and 6 months ago
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83 replies
randolph | 2 years and 8 months ago
> @twentypercentofx
> Also, don’t be so sensitive.
amen. this site is overrun with primadonna contractors.
andriywww1990 | 2 years and 8 months ago
Randolph, even if workers comp is tax deductible, it still adds to costs – it is still expensive – and i would rather have that money in my pocket and pay taxes on it than not have it. self employed people understand all of this. Most business people who are in a capacity of managing finances get it as well. My mom was an hr manager for a li re owner/manager (apt complexes) and she worked closley with the people involved in construction and maintenance and she gets it. I have a plumber coming here to bring me a door today he wants to pay what i consider a lot of money to have modified – he gets it. Some people don’t understand it. The people who least understand it are over here by me, civil servents and the like who have great benefits andvretirement plans.
I hope you don’t think i am one of the primidonna contractors. A lot of what i am saying on here i did not understand myself until i worked in it and i try to be fair and help people in a generous and less self serving way.
Master Plvmber | 2 years and 8 months ago
> @randolph
> amen. this site is overrun with primadonna contractors.
Let’s put it to a vote and see if people would rather have your posts or mine here.
Either way, go crazy. I won’t comment on your posts anymore.
bocuckoo | 2 years and 8 months ago
I really don’t understand what is in question. Contractors certainly do not hold a monopoly and nor do they price fix with their competition. In an area with population density you certainly have your choice of contractors. All parties on this sight have recommended getting multiple bids and doing extensive research in order to make an educated choice. What other industry/service is it common place to address a bid/cost like you are doing? Whether it is profit margin, workers comp, costs of labor, overhead etc etc, a contractor has every right to quote a job as he/she sees fit…just as you the homeowner has every right to decline it. Perhaps you just dont want to put the work in to find the best fit for your project or feel entitled to have the “best” contractor do it for the “lowest” price???
randolph | 2 years and 8 months ago
> @Master Plvmber
> . I won’t comment on your posts anymore.
LOL – as twentypercent said, don’t be so sensitive!
randolph | 2 years and 8 months ago
> @bocuckoo
> I really don’t understand what is in question.
the question was if the price i was being quoted was reasonable, and the reason i asked is the utter lack of transparency in dealing with a contractor…..and then this whole thing got way out of hand.
bocuckoo | 2 years and 8 months ago
Got it. I guess it may be best as you did to question specific contractors/quotes vs contractors as an entire breed….
andriywww1990 | 2 years and 8 months ago
Bocuckoo, i think you might agree with this statement: “if these contracting businesses can support a team of owners/workers giving them the same benefits and statutory protections that people wearing suits and working in offices on 5th ave get AND deliver profit margins that investors want, we would have wall street hedge funds getting involved in this work”. We don’t have wall street investors buying up small contracting firms and paying the owners to stay on and there is a reason for this – the profit margins are not there.
andriywww1990 | 2 years and 8 months ago
As much as some find master plumber a little disagreeable at times, he is an authority on what he does. This board would be at a loss without him-
bocuckoo | 2 years and 8 months ago
Doorsbythetingerswagon… agreed. If we are to question the “fleecing” being done in this town, perhaps we should look a bit closer at the offices on 5th ave instead of the man in the van driving on 5th ave.
andriywww1990 | 2 years and 8 months ago
Randolph, it is not that contractors feel we are special. It is that customers cannot seem to grasp market forces. There are people reading this right now with business degrees from very good universities and they have been taught why a free market protects the consumer and they cannot understand that this works on contractors as well as it does a factory making widgets. This is economics 101. Throw in a few bad actiors, a little racism, and people who do not belive in progressive era labor refirms and it makes it very hard for legitimate business to make money in a free market.
There are also people who understand it but are not saying anything because they do not want to admit that we are businesses and we are entitled to things others enjoy – paid vac., sick days, 401k, health care, because they realize if the free market was taken away and we worked in an environment where all of this was mandatory, these small businesses would be charging a lot more.
andriywww1990 | 2 years and 8 months ago
Many contractors cheat. They do not set out in business with the intention of cheating but the market is so competitive that if they do not find some way to cheat someone, they would not survive. If they try to do the right thing, some guy doing the wrong thing comes along and submits a lower bid and gets the job. Customers are quite fine with this arrangement until the contractor cheats them by cutting corners on the job and then we hear about it on this board.
Look what happen to the painting industry. 30 years ago there were painters all over the city with vans advertising their trade. They operated in the open, paid taxes, carried insurance and tried to be upstanding citizens. Where did they go? They have been supplanted by painters who do not pay taxes nor carry insurance and realky don’t care any further than getting paid and the customer does not mind until the paint is peeling off the wood because someone did not use primer. Its economics 101, the legitimate operators cannot make money and don’t want to cheat so they leave the industry. The c ustomer gets screwed.
In short, if we try to give ourselves 4 weeks paid vacation, give the help medical insurance, allow some paid sick days, set up a 401k for an employee, the customers thank us for trying to do the right thing by hiring someone who does not give a crap about anything and dumps trash on the side of the park over hear where i live. That is the reality of the free market. That is why i support government regulation.
andriywww1990 | 2 years and 8 months ago
For people with college degrees who cannot understand what i have been talking about in this post – don’t be embarrassed. I took economics 101 and 102 at dowling college in the summer of 1985. Got A’s in both classes. How the “dynamic” (randolph’s term; i prefer the terms free market, market, or market forces) works to favor the consumer was quite clearly explained in econ 101. I did not think too much about what i was taught in those classes until i had already been in business on my own, full-time, for about 10 years. Then i began to understand it: the market dynamic naturally works against labor and small business and encourages the best price up to the point that people would run those who provide the services out of business. It works against many of the principles many people in brooklyn claim to value to the detriment of individuals. It encourages discord and racial discrimination. That is why we had a labor movement in this country. That is why we have legislation designed protect workers and why we had a civil rights movement and civil righ ts acts that enacted further reforms aimed at stopping racial exploitation in the workplace.
The reason some contractors in this market react the way they do to the free market is, if we allowed it, the market would have us exploiting 10 year olds. I would be forced to hire 10 year olds if we did not push back.
For those of you who do not have the privilege of a college education, i would be glad to explain more about fancy terms i have used – “free market” or “collusion”. I also apologize if i come across as though i am addressing an educated audiance but i do make some possibly wrong assumptions about the audience here. And for those of us with an education, it would be great if we can apply what we have been taught using a lot of someone else’s money to the communities around us or the communities a little further from where we live.
The free market does not work for all. It never has and it never will. Econ 101.
randolph | 2 years and 8 months ago
> @doorsbythetinkerswagon
honestly i agree with everything you are saying. my point is why does all of that have to be so vaguely presented to the homeowner? using the example of this bid (and pretty much every other one i have ever seen) there is no breakdown. why can’t it be presented in a way that I could see how much of that goes into parts, labor, overhead, contingency, whatever you want to call it? it seems to me what you are saying is that that sort of disclosure would give the game up so to speak and the customer would go somewhere else because of how heavily weighted the cost of the job is to the things that they are not actually buying or interested in paying for (401k, insurance, etc)?
the frustration for me is that the whole system seems to be built on making people rely on a vibe (trustworthiness) and blind faith that whatever you are agreeing to pay is both reasonable and going to get the job done in a satisfactory manner. i just cannot think of any other transaction that happens in the same manner.
andriywww1990 | 2 years and 8 months ago
Randolph. I knew you would read what i wrote, thank you.
I have asked people in the past for breakdowns on large ticket items – an air compressor for a 5 ton ac unit. We got tha price once. A reno on a floor – the contractor broke it out by labor, materials, overhead, and profit. But in my work now? I would get very nervous about someone asking for a breakdown in the kind of work i do because it is so absolutely labor intensive and the cost of epoxies and wood and glass have pretty much doubled from say 4, maybe 5 years ago and most of that since covid. The other issue for contractors is we have to pad by 10% or so to protect ourselves (i broke a $180 piece of glass 3 weeks ago). If we let customers see the numbers they begin to nickle and dime the jobs and we won’t have a contingency.
Since you read what people say and converse, i will bounce some of this off some contractors and see what they say.
I just thought of something else. We had an electrical contractor in a building once who used to let me measure the jobs, price the points, tally the materia ls and i’d send it over and it would come back on letterhead with labor and materials.
When we did our bathroom here i told lombardi what i wanted (tub, tile, vanity, commode) and he gave me a price with no breakdown. Of course, i knew where the materials came from and what they cost but i really did not care what his labor was.
I will see who i run into over the next day or so and see what answers i can get you.
Guest User | 2 years and 8 months ago
@randolph parking in NYC is a nightmare for contractors. Think about how much time and gas they use merely stalling their jobs. That necessary stalling has real cost and real affect on final price to customer. As an example, adding a line item for an extra trip because a supply house mistaken part order doesn’t typically look good on proposals but it happens all too frequently none the less.
Many vendors like working for me because I streamline their apartment access, lump multiple jobs together in one visit, and make work authorization decisions quickly while they are on site instead of turning one visit into two or three trips. They give me better pricing and service when I do this kind of stuff reliably.
Can you find a contractor more work for bulk discount? If you don’t have other work to offer now, can you gather neighbors to join in as a bulk customer offering in exchange for bulk discount pricing? Some vendors will even discount if you put their sign in their window/lawn/front stoop, make a positive yelp review, etc.
andriywww1990 | 2 years and 8 months ago
So i spoke to a contractor neighbor and it is just what i say and what jeremy says. Things come up. Some areas things are easy, parking is easy, everything flows and some jobs have headaches. Parking in an unknown area can be bad. If we don’t understand the schedules and how the traffic agents work an area or forget a meter, tickets. 2 tickets on a job. A broken piece of glass. If we left a 10% contingency off a job on the customer’s word that if it was needed they would pay it, some (i am not say all) customers would say “its your fault you got the ticket, your tool broke, you broke the glass.” I let a customer pull that with me ONE time and never let it happen again. In truth, most customers are reasonable but some people will try it. Trust me, that contingency gets burned every job – sitting in traffic on the bqe- and we don’t get rich off the pennies that remain.
If i run into more trades people over the next days, i ask them.
andriywww1990 | 2 years and 8 months ago
Randolph, in so far as the padding goes: in addition to protecting the contractor in the event they get an unexpected number of tickets or waste an afternoon in traffic, it allows us to NOT nickle and dime the customer. Customers sometimes change or ask for small things on jobs. If the job went well (no tickets) and lets say a customer had me rebuild entry doors and they have me painting the inside of said doors and they decide they want the inside a darker shade of white. IF THE JOB WENT WELL, i go out and buy another quart of paint and I DO NOT BILL CUSTOMER FOR IT, it allows me to smile and say “i’ve got this”.
Right now i am in something with a customer who has been great. I removed an iron gate in front of his house after rebuilding the doors behind it. When i cut the gate off of the stone holding it, i thought the steel pins in the stone would remain. They didn’t. They fell out, leaving holes the diameter of a finger in the stone. I want to fill the holes with dyed mortar but cannot find the right color dye. He knows i have wasted hours on this and he said to me “look, as far as i am concerned, that was not in the scope of your work”. This job has gone well (no tickets, parking in front of house) and the second he said that all it made me want to do is find a fix for that stone even more. But the money has to be there for me to expend time on this.
Padding a job a little allows a contractor to deliver an extra level of professionalism. It allows us to to deliver top knotch service with a smile as opposed to getting annoyed when customers ask for small things. I used to work for contractors that bitched and complained about customer changes and the reason they got mad was, they did not make an allowance for that from the honest and the changes might have been small price wise and the customer does not understand why the contractor is getting annoyed about nickles.
All businesses. All of them have a contingency. I do not care if it is GM, Ford, Meile, Bosch, or a law firm in the city, they all have money built in for unexpected expenses. The issue here is that you are asking to look at those numbers and trust me, there are customers in this world who would ask for that back and say “we’ll discuss that bridge when we get to it” and when we get to the bridge they will say “its your fault you had to buy another widget and got stuck on the BQE”.
Since i know you are reading this, i will see if i can talk to a trade person whose work is less an art than mine and see what they say.
andriywww1990 | 2 years and 8 months ago
“On set” not honest.