Has anyone actually tracked rehab costs per square foot per trade and found it useful for anything

Question

I started doing this six months ago on paper, just for Ocean County liens I was modeling, and the numbers got weird fast. Framing runs about $12 to $18 a foot in the decks I have pulled apart from Toms River properties. Plumbing is all over the place, $9 to $31 a foot depending on whether the house has a slab or a crawl. Electrical somewhere in the middle, $11 to $19 in most of the comps I can find. The ranges are so wide that I do not know what I am actually learning.

The conventional wisdom I started with was that per square foot is a useful sanity check, you run the number against what a GC quotes and see if it falls inside the band. That held up on the Phoenix house I renovated myself, the finished costs came in near what the $42 a foot rule of thumb would predict for that zip. But Phoenix is a different planet from a 1960s ranch in Manahawkin with a wet basement and galvanized supply lines, and $42 a foot there would not touch the actual scope.

So now I track by trade and by item, not by square foot. Toilet rough-in versus toilet finish versus full bath gut. Window swap versus window with frame rot. The line items are starting to mean something after six months. A bathroom gut in the Ocean County properties I have modeled runs $6,400 to $9,100 depending on who owns the tile decision and whether the subfloor needs to come out. That number I can do something with. Forty dollars a foot I cannot.

Rena Guide · Answer

Six months of Ocean County line items is genuinely useful data, and the conclusion you landed on is the right one for your situation.

Per-square-foot figures work as a first filter, nothing more. They tell you whether a quote is wildly out of range before you have done any scoping. Once you are past that gate, they stop earning their keep, for exactly the reason you found: a 1960s ranch with galvanized supply lines and a wet basement does not share a cost profile with a clean Phoenix slab, and one number cannot hold both.

What you are building, scope-specific line items tied to a real geography and real conditions, is what experienced rehabbers actually rely on. Your $6,400 to $9,100 bathroom gut range is meaningful because it has a condition attached to it, subfloor or not, and a decision boundary, who controls the tile. That is the kind of qualifier that makes the number transferable to the next project. A bare cost-per-foot figure carries none of that.

The one thing worth adding to your tracking: capture who did the work alongside the number. Ocean County labor pricing varies enough between crews that the same scope can land at different points in your range depending on the contractor. After another six months you may find your range tightens when you filter by crew, which tells you something useful about pricing power and reliability.

The Rena strategy guide for general contracting covers why capable crews command pricing power right now, the labor shortage context is worth reading if you are also thinking about which GC relationships to build.

Are the Ocean County ranges you are seeing shifting at all across the six months, or have they been stable?

Has anyone actually tracked rehab costs per square foot per trade and found it useful for anything

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