Most commercial landscaping bid requests get priced exactly as written. The contractor who walks the property first is the only one bidding on the job the property actually has.
Open a commercial landscaping bid request and you’ll usually find the same list. Mow, edge, mulch, seasonal color, and a line for irrigation repairs as needed. It’s a tidy document. It’s almost never the scope.
Nothing on it about the corner by Building B that holds water for three days after a storm, nothing about the controller that runs every zone whether it rained or not, and nothing about the two silver maples slowly lifting the main walk toward the front entrance. Those are the things the grounds actually need. None of them will appear in the request unless somebody asks.
Price the list and you compete on price alone, against three other contractors who also priced the list, on a document that none of you had any hand in writing. Ask first. Then you’re the only bidder who understands the property.
In short
- A bid request describes what somebody has been paying for. It rarely describes what the grounds need.
- Three things are almost never on the list: drainage, irrigation, and trees. Each one is a capital item that comes out of a different budget than the monthly.
- Asking wins the contract and protects the crew, who otherwise repeat the same failed work every season.
Why the request describes a service and not a property
A property manager writing a grounds number usually starts from last year’s contract and adds a little. Nobody has told them anything different, so the scope carries forward unchanged, year after year, describing a service instead of a place.
That’s why it reads like a menu. It was written from an invoice. Nobody walked it.
So the contractor who walks the grounds and names what is failing arrives with a different document altogether. They’re describing the property. The property manager now has something to put in next year’s plan that they didn’t have that morning, and they didn’t have to go looking for it.
Three things almost never on the list
These come up on nearly every commercial property, and they share a useful quality. Each one is a defined project with a defined cost, which is exactly the kind of thing a property manager knows how to get approved.
01
Drainage
Standing water days after a storm. Dead low spots that get re-sodded every spring and die again by August. Erosion at downspout outfalls. Catch basins silted in to the rim. None of it’s a mowing problem, and mowing it harder won’t help.
02
Irrigation
Controller age, and whether anyone still knows the password. Missing rain or flow sensors. Heads watering sidewalk and parking. Zones on one schedule regardless of exposure. All of it’s invisible from a truck window. Twenty minutes on foot and it’s obvious.
03
Trees
Roots heaving walks and curbs. Deadwood over parking stalls and entries. Limbs into the roofline. A tree that drops a limb onto a tenant vehicle stops being a grounds question and becomes a liability conversation involving the property manager, the owner, and an insurer, and the walk is where that gets caught first.
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Why these three
They fail slowly. They’re expensive to ignore. None of them can be fixed by the crew that shows up on Tuesdays, because each one needs a number and an approval before anybody can touch it, which is exactly what makes them a project you can win outright.
Two of the three have a published standard behind them, which is worth knowing because it changes how the conversation sounds. Tree work in the United States is measured against ANSI A300, developed by the Tree Care Industry Association and described as the tree care industry standard of care. Part 9 covers tree risk assessment. When you point at deadwood over a parking stall and say it’s a Part 9 question, you’re naming the same thing the property manager’s insurer will name later.
Irrigation has its own version. The EPA’s WaterSense program certifies irrigation auditors and publishes a public directory of certified professionals that can be filtered for commercial work. If your people hold that certification, say so, and tell the property manager where to check it.
Get on more properties
Abstrakt sets appointments with the property managers, facility managers, and owners who decide what the grounds budget pays for, so your estimators spend their time walking properties instead of chasing bid requests. The walk, the number, the proposal, and the contract are yours.
The questions that surface them
You don’t need a long discovery call. Four questions on the walk will do it, and every one of them sounds like interest in the property instead of interest in the contract.
“Where does water sit after a heavy rain?” Property managers always know. They have heard about it from a tenant. This question turns a complaint they have been absorbing into a line item somebody can price.
“Is there anything out here the crew keeps redoing?” Repeat work is the clearest signal of an underlying failure. Sod that dies in the same corner every year is drainage. Turf that browns on one side is irrigation coverage.
“How old is the irrigation controller, and does it have a rain sensor?” Specific enough that a vague answer is itself an answer. If nobody knows, nobody is managing it.
“What have you been told needs fixing that you never got a number for?” This one produces the scope on its own more often than the other three combined. Ask it last, then stop talking.
From the monthly line to a project with a number
The reason this matters is where the money lives. Maintenance comes out of an operating line that’s already spoken for and gets compared against last year. The three items above don’t belong there at all.
| What the request says | What the walk finds | What it becomes |
|---|---|---|
| Turf care and reseeding as needed | The same corner dies every year | A regrade and drain, priced once |
| Irrigation repairs as needed | No rain sensor, controller nobody can log into | A controller replacement and a zone audit |
| Tree and shrub pruning | Deadwood over occupied parking stalls | A risk assessment and a pruning cycle |
| Seasonal color rotations | Beds failing because the grade sends water past them | Bed rebuild with the drainage fixed first |
Each row on the right has a beginning, an end, and a number. That’s what makes it approvable. A property manager can’t get more money for mowing. They can absolutely get money for a drain that stops a tenant complaint they have been fielding for two years.
What asking does for the crew
There’s a second reason to do this, and it has nothing to do with winning the bid.
A crew sent to maintain a property with a drainage failure will fight that failure for as long as the contract runs, re-sodding the same corner every spring, replacing the same plants behind it, and absorbing the blame for results the site was never going to allow. The account looks unprofitable. It’s. Naming the problem during the bid is how the crew stops paying for it out of their hours.
It also sets expectations with the property manager before the contract starts. A manager who has been told about the low spot reads it as a known condition. A manager who hasn’t been told reads it as your crew doing poor work.
Ask which fiscal year the property runs on
One practical note to close on. Capital items get approved on a cycle, and the cycle isn’t the same at every property. Some run a calendar fiscal year. Plenty of institutional owners run July to June, which puts the same sequence six months out of step.
Ask which one the property is on. It costs you a single sentence on the walk, and it tells you whether the number you just produced has a few weeks to find its way into a plan or the better part of a year, which is the difference between following up now and holding it until their planning actually opens. Ask early.
Frequently Asked Questions
What should you ask before pricing a commercial landscaping bid?
Where water sits after heavy rain, whether the crew keeps redoing the same work, how old the irrigation controller is and whether it has a rain sensor, and what on the property they have been told to fix but never got a number for. The last one usually produces the scope on its own.
Why are drainage, irrigation and trees missing from most bid requests?
Because the request is usually copied forward from last year’s contract, and last year’s contract was copied from the one before it. It describes a service somebody has been buying. Nobody rewrites it from a walk unless a contractor gives them a reason to.
What is ANSI A300 and why does it matter on a commercial property?
ANSI A300 is the tree care industry standard of care in the United States, developed by the Tree Care Industry Association. It’s published in numbered parts, and Part 9 covers tree risk assessment. Referencing it gives a property manager a recognized basis for approving tree work, and it’s the same standard that comes up if a limb causes damage.
How do you turn a maintenance bid into a capital project?
Find the condition underneath the recurring task, then price fixing it once. Turf that dies in the same corner every year is a drainage project. Brown turf on one exposure is an irrigation project. Both have a defined scope and a defined cost, which is what a property manager needs to request money outside the operating line.
Should a commercial landscaping contractor walk the property before bidding?
Yes, and it’s the single highest-return hour in the process. A walk produces the observations nobody else bidding will have, it protects the crew from being measured against conditions the site won’t allow, and it gives the property manager something they can act on. Bidding a request you have never walked means competing on price against contractors who also haven’t walked it.
Keep going
- Commercial landscaping lead generation
- How to get commercial landscaping contracts
- Best landscaping marketing and lead generation companies
- Outsourced SDR services
- What to say when you cold call a facility manager
About this article
Jeff Winters is Chief Executive Officer at Abstrakt. Reviewed by Neil Erker, Chief Marketing Officer. Abstrakt sets appointments for commercial landscaping contractors and the rest of the trades, and the questions here come from that calling.
Abstrakt is a technology-enabled outsourced sales development company that books 100,000+ meetings a year for 1,500+ clients.
