About First Choice Home Builder Estimating Solution

Estimating for building construction takes estimating responsibilities to another level. Contracts are written based on estimates and they must be within a defined level of accuracy. It may be 2% or perhaps 5% but beyond your defined level of variance you become responsible for amounts over your variance ceiling amount. So it’s important, we all know it.

First Choice Estimating is providing you with an alternative. What’s out there is expensive and complex and much of your estimating, if not all, occurs before you even have a customer under contract. You either have a full time employee with the necessary experience to operate and maintain your complex estimating software or you don’t. Either is a tough place to be when trying to win customers.

First Choice Estimating has built a better tool for estimating. It’s affordable and flexible to customization. It has been finely tuned by estimating scores of custom homes. It is editable and in a familiar format, Excel. Easy to follow and edit on the fly the First Choice Estimating Template comes preset but can be quickly customized to suit your company’s particular style of home building. The databases are large enough to estimate a home and yet small enough and presented in a way that updating the costs is manageable. For the small to medium builder having too much database is as bad as having too little.

Other programs available for estimating have extraordinary requirements. Setup and implementation is onerous and takes considerable time investment. So much so that to successfully implement a cost estimating program is a full time job for a protracted period of time. The learning curve is steep. Even when the person implementing the program has experience it takes a long time to get results. It is simply unaffordable for the small to medium sized custom home builder. Program cost and staffing could easily run into the six digits. Then you face maintenance. The default databases provided by the major programs are enormous. Too many items to be useful on a daily basis and requires constant cost updates.

First Choice Estimating, LLC has a cost database sufficient to estimate a custom home. Costs must be changed to reflect your local economy and items added to reflect your approach to doing business but the setup time is a lot quicker than other programs and the database is trim enough to be approachable and sustainable.

You add only the items you need at the time and many of the initial costs can be input by the labor or material provider to save time by sending an Excel copy of the estimating worksheet and simply copied and pasted over the existing data. The database will develop over time to be only what you need to run your business. Anything more would be a waste.