It’ll take at least a couple of weeks if not longer for your solicited general contractors to get back to you with high level numbers.  Make sure you set expectation on when they should get back to you by.  When their proposal and bid is ready, meet each general contractor to go over the numbers.  Don’t be surprised by the range in which the bids come back.  Our bids ranged from 620K to as much as 820K.  All bids being way over our anticipated numbers.

To quickly assess the bid, go straight for the big numbers in each of the CSI categories like foundation, framing, rough-in systems, and finishes.  To understand the numbers it’s imperative to understand the assumptions the GC made in his or her interpretation of the plans.  You can quickly establish a baseline with several bids by taking each of the high level category numbers and comparing them.  In our case for example, plumbing came in around 20K on average from each of the GCs.  When the third GC came back with his bid of 30K, we quickly spotted to be out of the “norm” of the baseline and were able to question the assumptions in how he arrived at a higher figure.  After several minutes we quickly found that he had assumed that we would want tankless water heater and other upgraded fixtures as well.