The Ballpark Trap
You ask a contractor for a rough number. They hesitate. You wonder why — it’s just a ballpark, you say, you won’t hold them to it.
You will. Everyone does. And they know it.
I heard the sharpest version of this from Jeff Talmadge, a design-build contractor in Aptos California, who’s watched the same story play out for years. A homeowner calls around for a ballpark number. One contractor gives an honest number based on experience with many projects. Another, hungrier for the job, gives a lower one, knowing that it’s low. The homeowner — being entirely reasonable — goes with the lower number and hires a designer to draw up the project.
Months later, drawings in hand, the real contractor bids come in. They’re nowhere near that first number — sometimes 50% higher. And now the homeowner is stuck. Spend the extra money they didn’t plan for. Send the designer back to cut the project down and start over, or just walk away from the whole thing. But one thing that almost never happens is to go back to the contractor who gave you an honest guess.
This is why a contractor’s silence, or their hedging, isn’t obstruction. It’s self-preservation. Give a number too early fi it’s too high you are out, if it’s too low, you’re the one who gets blamed for it later — even by the client who insisted they wouldn’t hold you to it.
The way out isn’t finding a contractor willing to say a smaller number. It’s getting a number that’s actually built from something — the scope, the finishes, the site — before you fall in love with a design that number can’t support.
That’s the whole idea behind The Budget Game. Get the realistic rough order of magnitude budget first. Then design toward it, instead of designing first and hoping the number catches up.
— story via Jeff Talmadge, Talmadge Construction, Aptos CA (talmadgeconstruction.com)