What a verbal quote of eighty five dollars a foot all in for a rehab should actually be checked against
A verbal quote like eighty five dollars a square foot, all in, on a 1,600 square foot house works out to 136,000, and the number alone does not say much without knowing what it includes. Worth confirming before treating that figure as a real price: whether permits are included or billed separately, whether appliances and fixtures are in the number or picked later and added on top, and whether a new roof, if the house needs one, falls inside the square footage number or sits outside it, since roof area is not floor area. More fundamentally, pricing by the square foot is a shortcut, useful for a rough gut check before walking a property, but it breaks down as a real pricing method because a kitchen costs roughly what a kitchen costs whether the house is 1,200 feet or 2,400. A rehab quote built purely on square footage without a line-item scope tends to hide exactly where the money is going. Going into a second meeting with a contractor, the questions worth asking directly are: what is the line item breakdown behind the per foot number, are permits and fixtures included, and how is the roof being treated if it needs replacement. Real questions get a real scope back; a vague number stays vague.
