Disclaimer

Budget figures are planning ranges, not quotations

Every budget figure on this site is a planning range in US dollars for commercial construction in the Denver metro. Each excludes land, design and engineering fees, permit and plan review fees, utility tap and connection fees, survey and geotechnical reports, testing and special inspection, furniture and equipment, owner contingency and any applicable tax. Each assumes normal site conditions and a buildable season. All carry the date they were last reviewed.

They are published so an owner can size a project and take a number to a board before spending money on design. They are not an offer, not a quotation and not a bid.

The ranges are wide on purpose and the width is information. What moves a number to the top is set out on the budgets page, and the first item on that list is thin bid coverage, which is the one nobody mentions.

Some lines carry no figure and say “site visit” instead. That is not a sales device: a foundation on expansive soils is priced from a geotechnical report for a specific parcel, and no web page has that information.

Bid coverage counts describe a market, not a promise

The coverage register describes how many firms typically bid each trade in this metro, for a commercial project of ordinary size, at the review date. It is a planning figure of the same kind as a published lead time.

It is not a commitment about your project. How many firms bid a package depends on the season, the state of the market, the scope, the schedule, the contract terms and how early they were invited. A trade shown as drawing four bids can draw one in a bad month.

It is published because it is useful and because almost nobody shares it, not because it can be guaranteed. What a contractor can be held to is the count on your project, after the fact, which is why the site repeatedly suggests you ask for it.

The gap register is illustrative

The eight boundaries on the coverage page are the ones that recur most reliably across commercial projects, and the figures beside each are planning ranges for what that scope costs caught at levelling against found in the field.

They are illustrative of a mechanism rather than a prediction about any particular building. Your project may have none of them and will certainly have others. The exclusions quoted are representative of the wording that commonly appears in subcontract bids; they are not quotations from any actual bid, from any actual firm, on any actual project.

The arithmetic comparing early and late cost is the sum of the published ranges, not a case study.

What this site does not claim about this business

This is the complete list, and it is published because the honest version of “we did not say that” is to say what was not said.

This site publishes no founding year or years in business, no ownership structure, no employee count, no licence or registration number, no bonding capacity or surety name, no insurance limits, no annual volume or project count, no named client or project, no photograph of completed work, no safety statistic or experience modification rate, no award, certification or review score, and no claim that this firm self-performs any trade.

None of those was supplied to us, and the instruction was to invent nothing. Each is a configured value left empty in the site’s configuration file, and where a reader would reasonably expect one, the page says it is available on request. If any is later supplied, it appears everywhere at once and this paragraph shortens accordingly.

Everything this site does assert about how commercial construction works — the subcontract structure, exclusions practice, scope levelling, coverage, the boundaries, the contract mechanics — is a description of the category, which needs no credential and which you can verify against any contractor you speak to.

What is described here about the authorities is general

Descriptions on this site of planning and zoning review, building plan review, fire review, public works review, utility applications and special inspection are general information written by a builder to help you plan.

They are not the authority’s own information, they are not legal advice, and fees and procedures change. Where anything here disagrees with current requirements, current requirements are correct.

Contact

If anything here looks wrong, telephone (303) 986-4555 and tell us. We would rather correct it.