[talldatethrow]

Yes, 'qualified bidders'. And what are the qualifications to bid to do the cabinets on a 6 million dollar public works/commercial building, which means the building might have $300,000+ of cabinets at most? Basically zero qualifications besides having a license. And with public works, yes the GCs will basically go with the lowest bidder. And while change orders do happen, it's the GCs job to get them to stick to their bid or otherwise they're just burning their own money.

I'm not just lying. Decades of experience in this. Yes construction basically lowest bidder outside of some private construction where relationships count for a bit, but even then the subs with relationships will get squeezed to match the lowest bidder.

[lazide]

1) a bond (not that it necessarily means THAT much, but it’s not trivial)

2) no negative outstanding complaints on said license

3) no negative history with the owner, GC, or prime contractors.

4) history of successfully completing equivalent work without screwing over everyone else involved.

5) on union jobs, the right kinds of union support.

The ‘basically’ in your statement is doing a lot of work.

No GC with a chance of staying solvent accepts random low bids from contractors they don’t know, have history with, or that don’t have history with someone they know doing work successfully of the same type.

Rework is already enough of a problem without having to completely redo plumbing, electrical, framing, carpentry, what have you because a sub screwed it up - and disappeared or is now insolvent.

Going after someone’s license takes forever, same with suing someone over damages, and it’s not like a bad sub disappearing in a drunken bender (or worse) after a screw up never happens in certain corners of the industry.

Will folks get squeezed a bit? Sure, it’s part of the game. They also fluff a bit, also part of the game. Somehow, the folks who know how to play it end up solvent and with new trucks at the end eh?

But avoiding fly by night subs is an even bigger part of staying alive. Public works are a classic shitshow on this front though in some areas.

[talldatethrow]

You basically listed pretty trivial things, that like I said, let the construction industry operate on lowest bidder model in general.

As an example, I see bidding stats in my PM tool. On average my customers have a win rate of about 15%. One of the bigger companies doing $1.5 million a month of work has a 10% win rate. They are very good at what they do.. you can't half as your way into 15+ million of work a year, year after year. But they still win only about 10%. Because even though they are very qualified and liked, jobs go to the most competitive bid.