How many firms will actually bid your job

Partly because it is not flattering — a table that says "two of your trades will have one bidder" is a harder first impression than a photograph of a finished lobby. And partly because it gives an owner a question they can ask that is genuinely difficult to answer well. We publish it because it is the most useful thing we know, and because the contractors who would struggle with the question are not the ones we are competing against for a thoughtful client.

From what the market does, not from one firm's address book. It is the number of firms that realistically bid a package of that trade, at that size, in this metro, in a normal month. It moves — a hail season empties the roofing market, a large project absorbs the earthwork firms for a summer — which is why the table carries a review date and why we check it rather than quoting it from memory.

Four things, in order. Widen the net geographically, which costs mobilisation but restores competition. Repackage the scope so more firms want it. Negotiate openly with the single bidder on an open-book basis, which is a weaker position but an honest one. Or tell the owner the trade will be expensive and carry it as a stated allowance. What we will not do is present a sole-source number as though it had been competed.

No, and this is worth saying because the table could be read that way. Five bids from firms who all skim-read the specification is worse than two bids from firms who read it properly, and a suspiciously low bid on a crowded trade is usually a scope misunderstanding rather than a bargain — which becomes a change order later. Coverage creates price tension; levelling is what makes the tension safe. The two are different jobs and you need both.

Yes, and ask for it from any contractor. It is unusual for an owner to request it and entirely reasonable. What you are looking for is the trades with one or two names, because those are the packages that will price themselves — and once you can see them, you can decide whether to spend money widening the net or to accept the number knowingly.

Take it to whoever is levelling your bids and ask them to show you, on each of those eight boundaries, which trade is carrying the scope. The answer should be a name, not a shrug. Any of the eight where nobody can tell you is a gap that is already in your project, and it is a great deal cheaper to close it now than when it is discovered.

Yes, and that is the uncomfortable part. They are not exotic failures; they are the ordinary consequence of thirty firms each writing a sensible exclusion. The flashing one appears on almost every building with a parapet. The blocking one appears on almost every fit-out. They recur because the structure of the industry produces them, which is also why they are predictable and therefore preventable.

Then they have not read their subcontractors' bids, because the subcontractors certainly do. Every subcontract bid in commercial construction carries an exclusions block. A general contractor whose proposal shows none has either absorbed them silently — which means they are carrying risk they have not priced, and that ends badly for somebody — or has not looked.