What Six Competitive Bids Look Like, and Why Two Rushed Quotes Are Not Enough
When a major project comes up, the board’s instinct is understandable. The project feels urgent, the decision feels large, and getting it done feels more important than getting it perfect. Two or three quotes come in from contractors the property manager knows. The board reviews the numbers, chooses the one that seems reasonable, and moves forward. This is what most boards do. It is also how communities consistently overpay, select vendors who lack the credentials or equipment for the actual scope, and end up with work that is never independently verified.
The problem with two or three rushed quotes is not the number itself, it is everything that surrounds the number. Are all the vendors bidding on the same scope? Are the scope documents detailed enough to produce comparable proposals, or is each vendor interpreting what the project requires differently? Are there critical scope items that one vendor excluded that another included? Is the lowest number low because of efficiency and experience, or because the vendor is planning to bill for scope additions after the contract is signed? Without a formal competitive process, the board has no way to know.
When CAP ran the bid process for the Maplewood Commons tree removal project, it collected six competitive bids. Before soliciting a single quote, CAP built a detailed site map marking all utilities, irrigation zones, and property access constraints. A standardized scope document was developed that every vendor bid against: identical specifications, identical site information, identical deliverables. Each bid came back on a comparable basis.
The range across six bids was nearly ten thousand dollars on the same project. Three of the six bids excluded critical scope items that the board would not have caught without a line-by-line comparison: stump grinding in one case, debris removal in another, root barrier installation in a third. The recommended vendor, full scope, verified credentials, appropriate equipment for the site constraints, references confirmed, came in nearly four thousand dollars below the second-cheapest comparable bid.
That four thousand dollars is the direct, measurable return of a structured competitive process. But the more important return is the confidence of knowing that the selected vendor was chosen on a defensible, documented basis, not a gut feeling under time pressure.
For any project above a certain dollar threshold, the cost of running a proper bid process through CAP is a fraction of what it saves in competitive pricing and avoided scope problems alone.