How to Compare Home Builder Bids

You cannot compare builder bids until you have rewritten them into the same format, and the headline price is the last number you should look at. Two proposals on the same plan can differ by six figures without either builder doing anything dishonest, purely because they made different assumptions about what a proposal is supposed to contain. The method below takes a few hours and it is the highest-value few hours in the whole project. This article is part of our guide to choosing a home builder in Boise.

There is no standard format for a residential construction proposal, so every builder invents one. One arrives as a single page with a number and a paragraph. One arrives as a forty-page line-item budget with divisions and allowance schedules. One arrives as a spreadsheet with twenty lines and a fee at the bottom.

None of those is wrong, but they cannot be laid side by side. Worse, the differences are structural rather than cosmetic: the single-page bid may genuinely include everything and the forty-page one may exclude the driveway on page thirty-eight. Until you have forced them into a common shape, any comparison you make is a comparison of document design.

Write your own list of everything the project requires, then mark each bid against it. Do this before you open the proposals, so the list reflects the house rather than whichever bid you read first.

A workable list for a new home runs roughly: lot evaluation and survey, design, structural engineering, permit and plan review fees, impact and utility connection fees, site work and excavation, foundation, framing, roofing, windows and exterior doors, siding and exterior finishes, plumbing, electrical, HVAC, insulation, drywall, interior doors and millwork, cabinetry, countertops, flooring, tile, paint, hardware, fixtures, appliances, driveway, landscape and irrigation, final grade, and cleanup. Then add the local items: well and septic if the parcel is rural, geotechnical report if the lot has slope, retaining if the site steps.

Mark each line on each bid as included, excluded, allowance, or unstated. The unstated ones are the ones to chase first, because they are the ones that will turn into a conversation in month six.

Allowances are the most common reason two honest bids look different, and the fix is to reprice all of them at the same specification. An allowance is a placeholder for something you have not chosen yet. If Builder A carries a flooring allowance based on what flooring actually costs at a Boise supplier and Builder B carries one chosen to keep the total attractive, B looks cheaper today and is not cheaper.

The practical method is to pick a real product for each allowance line, get one quote for it, and substitute that number into every bid. You do not need a final selection, just a consistent one. Ask each builder how they set the allowance and whether they can show you the quote behind it; a builder who set it properly will answer in about four seconds. Where a builder cannot substantiate an allowance, treat the line as unpriced rather than as a price.

The exclusions page is the most informative page in a construction proposal and almost nobody reads it first. Read it before the summary, before the price, before the pretty rendering.

What you are looking for is not whether exclusions exist. Legitimate exclusions are normal: land, impact fees, appliances, window coverings, and the parts of the landscape a homeowner usually handles later. You are looking for two things. First, whether an exclusion contradicts something in the sales conversation, which happens more than it should. Second, whether the list is suspiciously short for the complexity of the project. A bid on a sloped foothills lot with three exclusions has not thought about the site, and that lack of thought will surface as a change order rather than as a discount.

Two items go missing more often than any others. The first is the finished driveway and the final grade, which are easy to defer in a proposal and impossible to defer in real life, because you cannot get a certificate of occupancy on a house you cannot drive to. The second is impact and utility connection fees, which differ across Boise, Meridian, Eagle, Star, Kuna, Nampa, Caldwell and Middleton and are frequently listed as owner-paid without a number beside them. Ask each builder to put an estimate against every owner-paid line, even a rough one, so that the total you are comparing is the total you will actually write checks for.

Site work is the single largest swing item between two bids on the same house, and it is routinely carried by one and excluded by the other. On a serviced subdivision lot in Meridian, Nampa or Kuna, site work commonly runs $25,000 to $50,000. On a rural parcel in Ada or Canyon County needing a well, a septic system and an access drive, it runs $80,000 to $150,000 before a foundation is poured.

That range is larger than most of the differences people agonize over, so establish early which bid contains it and at what assumption. Ask specifically what soil condition the excavation number assumes, whether over-excavation and import are carried, whether the septic system is designed and permitted through Central District Health inside the price, and whether a power extension is included. If nobody has walked the lot, nobody has priced the lot. A written lot evaluation costs $950 to $3,500 and resolves this before you compare anything.

Find the contingency and the builder fee in each bid, and if you cannot find them, ask. Every bid contains both. The only question is whether they are shown to you or distributed invisibly across the trade lines.

Two things matter here. A bid with a stated contingency is not more expensive than one without; it is more honest, and comparing a bid that shows a contingency against one that hides it will make the honest builder look costly. Ask what happens to unused contingency at closeout, because the answer separates builders quickly. On the fee, ask whether it is a fixed amount or a percentage, and whether it applies to change orders and to allowance overages. A percentage fee on cost means every overrun grows the fee, which is worth knowing when you read fixed price versus cost plus.

Here is what the arithmetic looks like on a 2,400 square foot plan on a serviced lot, with the same drawings sent to two builders.

A $65,000 gap becomes an $8,000 gap, and an $8,000 gap between two builders on a nine to fourteen month project is not a reason to choose either one. That is the usual outcome of doing this properly. The decision moves off price and onto the things that actually determine how the year goes: who supervises the site, how changes are handled, how the two of them communicated during the bid.

Note that the allowance step is not in the table, because allowances have to be repriced against your own selections rather than against a published band. When you do that, the remaining gap either disappears or becomes decisive. Both outcomes are useful.

Once the scope matches, a residual difference of a few percent is overhead, margin and risk appetite, and paying it is sometimes the right call. A builder carrying a higher fee may be carrying a superintendent who runs three houses instead of eight, or a warranty department that answers the phone in month eight, or trade partners who are paid on time and therefore show up.

The opposite is also possible: the higher number is simply higher. The way to tell is to ask what the extra buys, in specifics, and see whether the answer describes a capability or a feeling. Our list of questions to ask a home builder is built for exactly this part of the conversation.

Do not run an auction, do not compare per square foot across different plans, and do not let a bid expire before you have understood it. Pushing builders to beat each other's totals produces a number someone cannot build to, and the recovery happens on your project through thinner supervision and cheaper subcontractors.

Cost per square foot is a sanity check, not a comparison. Most Treasure Valley custom homes plan between $250 and $400 per finished square foot excluding land, so a proposal well outside that band is worth a question, but a $20 per square foot difference between two different plans tells you almost nothing about either builder. And if a bid is presented with a short expiry, ask for an extension. A builder who will not give you two weeks to understand a $700,000 decision has told you how the build will feel. That is one of several home builder red flags worth taking seriously.

We will read a competing proposal with you and tell you what we think it is missing, including when the answer is that it looks solid and the other builder has priced it fairly. That happens reasonably often and we would rather you know. You can send it over, check the shape of your budget against the build cost calculator first, or read why home building bids vary so much for what is behind the differences you are seeing.