My unit price on a first REO trash-out doesn't survive the dump scale

Two mattresses in the photos means at least four in the house, that has been true on every job I've been near. Some transfer stations charge a separate mattress fee per unit, ours does, so call your facility and ask what they surcharge before you sign a flat bid.

The structural issue in your bid is that you priced a container and priced labor, then treated tonnage as a rounding error. On a furnished single story, volume fills before weight almost every time, so the binding constraint is pulls, not tons. Price the pulls.

A workable form: base price covering one pull and a stated number of crew hours, then a named per-additional-pull rate and a per-hour rate beyond the base. Whether a servicer honors that line depends entirely on the work order and the vendor agreement you signed, and many national servicers price against an internal allowable schedule with a cap above which you need written approval before you incur the cost. Get that threshold in writing from your coordinator, in the same email thread as the work order number, before you load anything past the first box. Verbal approval from a coordinator is worth very little when the invoice hits a different desk 40 days later.

On your numbers: $2,450 against $1,600 modeled cost is a 35 percent gross margin, which is defensible only if your hour estimate holds. At 14 hours instead of 10, cost goes to $1,936 and margin is 21 percent before you have absorbed the second pull. One overage event wipes the job.

The other thing that decides whether this line of work pays is the payment lag. Trash-out invoices to servicers commonly sit 30 to 60 days, sometimes longer if photos or a completion form are missing. You are financing the dump fees in the meantime. Ask what documentation triggers payment and shoot exactly that, before, during, and after.

Trailer and a dump truck beats roll-offs on small jobs if you can stomach the equipment. You stop paying $560 to rent a steel box and start paying tipping only. Different business though, you're buying a truck to save $300 a job.

I hire this out on the management side, so here's what makes me use somebody twice.

Bid it flat with a clearly named change order rate, and never exceed the flat number without an email from me first. The vendors who lose me are the ones who show up with a $4,100 invoice on a $2,400 bid and a story about the garage. I would rather approve $3,600 up front than argue about $1,700 after.

On your actual numbers, the piece you left out is drive and dump time. Every pull is somebody sitting at the transfer station. If you're self-hauling that's 90 minutes a round trip; if it's roll-offs it's a half day of waiting for the hauler and a crew standing around. Build it in or your 10 hours becomes 14 the way lantern said.

And take photos of every room before you touch anything, wide plus a close on anything that looks like it might be a personal document or a firearm. What you're allowed to do with belongings found in a foreclosed property is set by state law and sometimes by the servicer's own protocol, so ask the coordinator in writing what they want you to set aside. Foreclosure volume being what it is right now, coordinators are handing out a lot of these orders and the reliable vendor gets the next twelve.

I've never bid anything, so what jumps out at me is that trellis says he'd rather approve $3,600 up front. That's the whole answer isn't it? The problem isn't that you guessed wrong on tonnage. You guessed at all instead of asking to walk the property first. Can you get access before you commit to a number?