Construction Contracts 
For
every large city all around America, there is a Construction Data Company (CDC)
publication or newspaper full of construction building information that is
updated each week. Many cover three or more states in your area for one price.
Even the suburbs are covered, with a lot of updated, all-new,
construction-related information. For example, there is the CDC New York
Construction News, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, the CDC Chicago Construction News,
and the CDC Los Angeles Construction News and so on. These are useful
resources, available for a small yearly charge, which will help you bid on all
types of construction and building cleaning contracts for new construction
buildings. You can go online and order six-month to one-year subscriptions to a
CDC construction news publication to help you start your construction or
building cleaning adventure. You might even like to use the online CDC data
information system to obtain construction news at www.cdcnews.com. At this
site, you can submit some of your bids online and construction information on
line, after you sign up. Final construction cleaning, rough cleaning, and labor
cleaning opportunities can all be found in the CDC publications. Each newspaper
twice weekly, will list several hundred new building projects and will update
the previous week’s issue. It will provide the square footage of the building,
the general contractor or a construction company contact name to which you can
send your cleaning bid or get other information. The construction company name could
be listed under builder, developer, general contractor, construction manager,
or owner, as we discussed this earlier. Read over all of the information in
these newspapers, and then go online if you need free help from the CDC help
service center or more details.
When
we talk about new construction, we’re talking about brand-new buildings
constructed with all new materials—floors, windows, rest rooms, and doors, plus
newly painted walls, new carpet, and new cabinets. With all-new products, your
cleaning job is a little easier. These jobs can run from 5,000 to 5,000,000
square feet in size and from $ 500 to $500,000 in cleaning contract size, just
to do a one time construction clean up with all new, easy-to-clean material.
Most of the time, there is nothing hard to clean because the building is new.
You just need to remove all of the light dirt and dust created by the
construction crews. You can make, on the low end, $20,000 gross (at ten cents a
square foot) for the one-time final cleaning of a 200,000-square-foot new
construction building.
On the
high end, you could charge thirty cents per square foot and gross $60,000 for
the one-time final cleaning of a similar 200,000square-foot building. With a
staff of five to six cleaning people, cleaning a building this size should take
you approximately twenty to twenty-five days to complete. Just add up your
profit as you go to the bank. Please note that the low end construction
cleaning price is based on about ten cents per square foot, again! As I said,
you can go higher if you like, but this price is a good starting place to get
your new company in the door and to try out your business and bidding skills.
Again,
please remember to add a little extra money for a building with outside windows
that are three or more stories high. Set aside or put in an extra $ 2,000 to
$3,000 or more to hire a window cleaning professional or to rent high lift
equipment for the outside windows. Get three window cleaning contractors out of
The Blue Book of Building and Construction or from your local
yellow pages, and ask them for bids on the window cleaning part of the job,
save this for last if possible. Here, safety is first, not money or profit, but
you do want to make a little money on the window cleaning. You want to
subcontract, or “sub out,” the outside window cleaning to a window-cleaning
professional, if the building is three stories or higher. This is very
important. Do not try to make much profit on this subcontracted outside window
cleaning job because it might raise your bid price too much. Doing so may keep
you from winning the total bid or contract.
After
cleaning a newly constructed building, you can always go back and bid on the
daily/yearly cleaning service contract for this new building. In the same construction
newspapers (CDC) you will see the name of the owner or a representative of the
owner, phone, fax, address and other information. Present them with your
estimate for the daily cleaning service for the property. Again, always go
ahead and send your bids in quickly; don’t wait for the phone to ring when you
already have all of the details at your disposal. Use the general contractor
you did a great final construction cleaning job for as one of your references.
If, as happens very rarely, one property manager asks you not to send in bids
until he calls you for them, respect this, and make a note in your records
about the one request. Then, continue sending bids to all of the other
companies. If you were to charge ninety-nine cents per square foot to do daily
cleaning on this new 200,000-square-foot building, you would gross about
$198,000 per year, or $16,500 per month. If you win this contract, that is a
wonderful gross sum in a short amount of time.
Try to
remember that these bid prices are samples for your reference. Try your own
bidding with all types of square foot amounts to see how the building managers
respond. Try higher, lower, or the same with each bid; it is totally up to you
and your building cleaning location, specifications, and how much money you
want to make. The same issues have to be considered when you are trying to
obtain steady daily cleaning contracts for an older building, monthly contract
bidding, or one-time cleaning contracts. List the pricing in your bid according
to your set guidelines (square feet, job site visit if possible, location,
staffing, supplies, and other cost details) and list any specific terms under
which you would do the job.
When
you are doing construction cleaning in some big cities, you may run into
construction and cleaning service contracts that require you to use union
labor. When this happens, find out what the union hourly rates are for this job
and replace the $10-per-hour non-union rates with the local union rate to
calculate your higher costs. To get union pay rates, call the local labors
union hall for your specialty trade and ask them for the hourly pay rate for
their union members. Rates are likely to range from $20 to $ 47 per hour. Plug
that new pay rate into the same formula we used earlier for one man, eight
hours a day, to figure out your costs. This will help you adjust the bid price
you want to use for a union bid. The new higher pay rates will always double
your non -union bid price, whenever you bid on union jobs. When you win the
bid, you can use some of your staff and some union members to do the union job.
The union hall will tell you to hire one of their union workers for each or
your non-union worker you put on this union construction or building cleaning
job. But in time your non-union employees will or should join the union. In
other words, if you plan on using six people to do this union job, you can only
use three of your nonunion employees; you will have to take three union men
from the union hall. After you sign the union agreement form the union gives
you, you can start working on this union job site. Always try to sign your
three people up in this local union as soon as you start work on any union job
site. You will have to pay your guys the union rates for this union job until it
is finish. Then you can go back to paying them $10 per hour on the non-union
jobs. However, on the next few union jobs, you can use six of your own workers,
now new union members, for as long as they have kept paying their union dues.
When working on union jobs you may or may not be able to continue paying your
three employees at the $10 per hour rate that they were getting before. You
might want to talk to your workers to see if they will continue to work at the
old, lower rate until you get your first check from the union job, then you
will pay them the balance as you get paid. This will temporally take the strain
off of your union cash flow adjustment.
Now that you know how to find and work with private construction contracts, let’s talk a little about government contracts, another great source of business for you to use in making dirty millions the clean way.
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