What goes wrong today
- The three-bid rule is a fiduciary obligation, and non-comparable bids do not establish the market price it exists to find.
- Leveling four proposals by hand takes hours per project, and it is the first thing dropped when the week gets busy.
- Owners and boards ask why the winner won, and "it was the middle bid from someone we like" is not a defensible answer six months later.
- Work spans many properties with different conditions, and a vendor who bids only some of them can look cheapest for reasons that have nothing to do with price.
What Quotrium does about it
- One scope issued to every bidder, so the three bids in the file are three bids on the same job — the thing the policy was written to produce.
- Leveling done for you: every scope line against every vendor's answer, exclusions and ambiguities scored rather than skimmed, ranked 75% on scope coverage and 25% on price.
- An owner-ready PDF report — ranked proposals, the full leveling matrix, each vendor's exclusions with their notes, and the scope's assumptions — which is the record that answers "why this vendor" without you reconstructing it.
- Multi-property projects where a vendor's per-property breakdown must reconcile to their total, and a partial bid is ranked as a partial bid instead of quietly topping the list.
Manager — $129/mo
Managers running several jobs a month
- 6 projects per month
- 10 scope edits per project
- 50 contractor invites per project
- Unlimited contractors and properties
- Multi-property projects
Questions this raises
Terms worth knowing
- Three-bid rule — The three-bid rule is the common practice — and, for many property managers and HOA boards, a written policy — of collecting at least three competing bids before awarding work above a certain value.
- Bid leveling — Bid leveling is the process of adjusting competing contractor bids onto a common basis so their prices can be compared directly — adding in what one bidder excluded, stripping out what another included, until every number covers the same work.
- Apples-to-apples comparison — An apples-to-apples comparison is one where every bid covers identical work under identical conditions, so the only variable left between them is price. Achieving it requires a single shared scope; without one, the phrase is aspirational.
- General conditions — General conditions are the costs of running a job that are not part of any single task — supervision, dumpsters, portable toilets, temporary protection, permits, site cleanup, insurance and mobilisation.