Builder selected
November 6, 2005
We have selected James MacQueen as our builder. The process took more time than we initially anticipated. Reason for this, was that most of the prices we got back from the builders whom we invited to participate in the tender, were absolutely scary!!
o summarize, the tender was sent to four local builders on Skye, amongst which was James MacQueen. For reasons of confidentiality we’ve not disclosed the details of the other competing builders. Genuinely interested people can contact us by email for more details.
James MacQueen
Of all approached builders, James MacQueen entered with the overall lowest price for the project.
Local builder 2
Entered a price which was more than 20% over the lowest proposal.
Local builder 3
Entered a price which was 30% over the lowest proposal. This one was VERY noteworthy, as this builder - upon early inspection of the design - had indicated that he could build the house for a price below £800,00 per SQM. His actual proposal was way, way, way over that amount! Either his calculator was broke or he could not be bothered about the project anymore.
Local builder 4
Was on holiday and did not bother to return the tender document in time.
It will not come as a surprise that this was a very disappointing outcome. One month had passed and we basically only had one serious offering. At this point in time, there’s a lot of building activity going on on Skye and builders are very busy which - as good economics predict - drives up prices.
As we’re not willing to pay fancy prices for our Skye home, we quickly submitted the proposals of Builder 2 and Builder 3 to the waste-paper basket and we focussed on the offering of James MacQueen.
We validated his proposal against the following sources:
- Self-build prices in the UK, monthly published in the magazine “Home Building & Renovation.
- Builders on the mainland of Scotland. For this we used two builders from the area of Inverness. Their offers were not interesting as they had to take into account long travelling hours and were not willing to stay on site.
- Builders in Holland or from other European countries. It was feasable to mobilize a Dutch or Belgian team, however the overall difference with James MacQueen’s proposal were marginal, so we discarded this alternative.
Compared to the prices mentioned in “Home Building & Renovation”, James’s proposal was only marginally higher, so Friday the 4th of November I asked Jon (who coordinates the tender) to give James MacQueen a call and tell him that he won the tender.
Jon emailed us back that James MacQueen was happy to have been given the job. Upcoming November 17th, we will fly over to Skye for a short visit to meet with Jon and James.
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