Poll: How Much Pre-Bid & At-Risk Design?

Submitted: I recently came across a project that was out for bid and in the engineer's specifications required all bidding submitters to provide complete plans and hydraulic calculations to be submitted with their bid. I almost laughed out loud.

This wasn't a basic project (senior care roughly 130,000 sqft), but also not a project with some sort of critical design needs either. I would be curious to have a poll, specifically for contractors and their design teams, that asks about how much effort (square footage / layout sprinklers / layout sprinklers and pipe / calc & size pipe / complete material lists) they typically put into an estimate when they only get "performance-specification" or "design-build" specifications.

I don't know if some engineers know (or care) how much effort goes into bidding, but I'd be interested to see what the industry as a whole does. Of course when bidding, all that time is at-risk of being completely wasted without winning the bid.

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