Three contractors, three figures, and no way to tell which is the cheapest. That is usually a problem with the quotations rather than with the prices.
People come to us with two other quotations and ask which one is better. Most of the time the honest answer is that nobody could tell, because none of the three documents is comparable with the others.
A quotation you can judge does four things.
It separates material, labour and plant. One figure per stage tells you nothing. If the concrete is priced separately from the crew pouring it, then when the price of cement moves you can see exactly what moved and by how much, and you can check it against a supplier invoice. A single lump sum protects the contractor from that conversation, which is why so many of them are written that way.
It states what is not included. Every quotation has exclusions and an honest one lists them: the connection charges, the boundary wall, the joinery beyond a stated allowance, the boat loading to an island. A quotation with no exclusions is not a cheaper job, it is a job with the arguments still ahead of it.
It names the allowances. Tiles, sanitary ware, ironmongery and light fittings are almost always in a quotation at an allowance rather than at a real price, because nobody has chosen them yet. The document should say the figure per square metre or per item that has been allowed. Two quotations can be two hundred thousand rufiyaa apart on nothing but a tile allowance, and both of them look like the same building on paper.
It gives a programme with the weather in it. A date that assumes twelve months of dry Sundays is not a date. Ours adds a week per atoll stage between May and November for slipped sailings, and says so on the page, because a programme that is honest at the start does not need defending in month seven.
One more thing to look for, which is not in the quotation at all: ask who will be on site every day, and ask for that person's name. A price from a contractor who cannot answer that question is a price for a job somebody else will be running.
We would rather lose work to a quotation that does all of this than win it on a figure we both know is going to move.
