Square Foot Pricing?

This is a good one. I had a contractor call our office and ask for a bid price on a “secret” project. He said there was 50,000 square feet of glass 2 and 3 stories high on this building. They were going to be resurfacing the outside of the building so new construction on the outside and a normal window cleaning on the inside. He dropped a few hints on the secret project. I think it is legit, but ive never bid by the square foot. Anyone have any experience on square foot bidding?

Personally, I think anyone would be nuts to bid on this site unseen. Even architectural drawings would be better than going in blind. I’m sure there will still be other companies bidding on this regardless and they’ll guestimate it and do what they can to secure it so they can keep their crews busy.

I had the same request a few years back.

300,000 square feet of glass. They wanted a “price-per-square-foot”.

Silly formula. We just took our price and divided it by 300,000.

Sounds like a good idea…I have done it bidding commercial buildings for janitorial, because most property managers don’t know anything except cents per square foot…I look at labor/time/costs to come up with a price and then convert it square footage

Will they at least give you an idea of the window types as this would greatly help you to bid it, If its 15’x 15’ panes then you have it good if its 6"X 6" panes well then you better take your ibuprofen

Exactly. Even if you could come up with sq foot pricing, access to the glass, how dirty and what type of dirt is on them and how many actual panes (affects detailing) are what really determines actual cost.

Great question! I have called several WC companies in the country asking this very question. I got similar answers to the ones you’re getting - no answers. So I went back and looked at three buildings (3 large casinos) and came up with…drum roll…eighty-one cents a square foot.
Then I looked at other projects, used my “magical” number, and it was close enough for horseshoes.
Best of luck.

No see - no quote.

1 Like

I will not bid anything unless I look at it … I wont even bid a job off of blueprints… You never know what you will be getting into bidding like that…

1 Like

This is an old thread but I was wondering if anyone is pricing commercial work by the actual square footage of the glass? I just did a CCU on a small commercial office building and found my price to equal out to about 40 cents a square foot and I wondered if that was within the average or not.