Roofing sub came in $4,200 under the GC's line item and finished four days early on a 19-week gut rehab.
The GC had quoted $18,400 for tear-off, decking repair, and a full architectural shingle install on a 2,200 square foot ranch. The sub he actually used billed $14,200, finished on day eleven of a fifteen-day window, and the inspection cleared first visit. The GC kept the $4,200 spread, which is standard cost-plus behavior, but the early finish freed the HVAC rough-in crew to start Monday instead of the following week, which compressed the overall schedule by six days. Six days on a private money draw at 12 percent annualized on a $210,000 draw balance is roughly $415, so the schedule compression had real dollar value even if none of it flowed to the investor directly. The win here is not the sub's price, it is that a GC who manages schedule risk himself, rather than passing it through change orders, produced a compounding benefit that a fixed-bid contract with no schedule incentive would never have surfaced. The investor on this deal had no visibility into the sub's actual cost and no mechanism to share in the efficiency gain, which is the part worth sitting with. A shared savings clause, even a simple one that splits verified underruns fifty-fifty after the GC's margin is protected, would have returned roughly $2,100 to the project and still left the GC whole on profit. How is your current contract language handling sub-level savings when a trade comes in under the GC's stated line?
