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The estimate decides whether a commercial job pays
A RocketLevel guide, backed by decades of experience in the trade. A good commercial estimate gets approved fast, holds its scope against cuts, and protects your margin. A weak one draws supplements and disputes, and it pays slowly.
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Treat the estimate as documentation. Photograph, measure and write up every line, because reviewers cut what was eyeballed.
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Practices that get approved and paid
- Scope before you price. Walk the loss, identify every affected material and trade, and write the scope of work before you open the estimate.
- Document every line in the line notes. Put photos, moisture readings, and measurements behind each item, plus written notes in the estimate itself (the F9 line notes in Xactimate) that justify the quantity, the price, and any unusual condition. A reviewer rarely cuts a price you can trace to your actual cost and a documented reason, and an unexplained number usually gets cut.
- Capture the hidden scope. Code upgrades, ordinance-or-law triggers, hazardous materials, and difficult access are where commercial estimates underbill. Keep the two hazmat dates straight, because they are different rules with different years. Asbestos: OSHA 29 CFR 1926.1101 presumes thermal system insulation and surfacing material in buildings constructed no later than 1980 to contain asbestos (asphalt and vinyl flooring installed by then is treated the same way), and the inspection duty under EPA's asbestos National Emission Standards for Hazardous Air Pollutants (NESHAP) at 40 CFR 61.145(a) attaches before any demolition or renovation at any building age. Lead: EPA's Renovation, Repair and Painting (RRP) rule reaches pre-1978 target housing and child-occupied facilities only, while OSHA 29 CFR 1926.62 covers your crew on any construction work with lead exposure regardless of the year built. Writing "asbestos or lead on pre-1980 buildings" into a scope collapses four different triggers into one wrong date.
- Separate mitigation from reconstruction. They price differently and carry different margins, so don't blend them into one number.
- Set the not-to-exceed (NTE) amount and the change-order rule up front, in writing, in the contract. Define what triggers a change order, who may authorize one, and in what form, so scope creep becomes billable instead of absorbed. A verbal go-ahead from a facility manager who cannot bind the owner is not a change order.
- Match the carrier's tool. Know whether they want Xactimate, Symbility, or another format, and price in it.
- Build the supplement in as documentation from the start. When hidden damage appears, the photo and note you took on day one make the supplement a formality.
General conditions: the cost block most restoration estimates miss
General conditions are the project-wide costs of running the job that are not tied to any single trade line. On commercial reconstruction they are real money, they are separate from overhead and profit, and they are routinely under-captured by restorers who came up on residential insurance work where these costs are small or absorbed.
Price general conditions as their own distinct block, not folded into overhead and profit (O&P) and not buried inside trade lines. The common items include:
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General conditions checklist (copy into your estimate template)
- [ ] Temporary utilities: temporary power, temporary water, and portable toilets for the crew.
- [ ] Dumpsters and debris removal for the duration of the project.
- [ ] Site protection and security: floor and surface protection, plastic and containment, temporary fencing, and protecting the parts of the building that are not part of the loss.
- [ ] Supervision: the superintendent or project manager time spent on site running the job day to day.
- [ ] Project signage where required, and daily or final cleanup labor.
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On commercial reconstruction, general conditions are frequently larger than O&P, and they're easy to give away because residential estimating rarely breaks them out. That comparison is RocketLevel's working judgment rather than a published estimating standard, so run it on your last three jobs and see where yours land. Build a general-conditions section into your commercial template so these costs get captured every time, priced to the actual length and complexity of the job instead of discovered as a margin leak at closeout. General conditions cover the cost of running the project, and O&P compensates you for the general contracting itself, so price both.
Large-loss equipment, power, and fuel: bill it as a documented line item
On a big commercial dry-out, the drying setup is one of the largest costs on the job and one of the easiest to give away. A trailer desiccant rig, a floor of air movers, the generator and power distribution feeding them, and the diesel that keeps them running add up fast. Residential estimating rarely breaks these out, so restorers who came up on program work tend to bury them in a day rate or absorb them at closeout. Price them as their own lines, with the documentation to back the quantity, and the job pays for the infrastructure it actually needed.