President-elect Trump has advocated for rebuilding our infrastructure so that may lead to more jobs on schools, parks, city offices and public housing.

To find these job postings: Google – City of _____________ engineering and look for “requests for bids”.

In fairness, we must tell you that this process involves an incredible amount of work and the success ratio on average is 1 in 6 (we’ve been told). First you need to attend the pre-bid meeting to get a copy of the sample contract to submit to a bond underwriter at least 1 week before the bid meeting. The bond underwriter will evaluate the contract as well as the contractor to see if they can approve the bid bond. (example of underwriter declining a bond request because of the contract would be: if the contract was to paint a school and there is not enough time to do it before school is in session & the liquidated damages were $1000 per day!).

Once you have calculated your material and labor costs + profit and overhead, you need to add 3% of the contract price to your total to pay for the performance and payment bond. Bid bonds cost you nothing.

If you have a personal credit score of 720+, have been licensed for 3 years and own real estate in Arizona – we can get you pre-qualified for $400,000 per job and aggregate, and the cost is 2.5%. If your credit score is not that high you will be underwritten with more financial information needing to be provided. If you’ve never done a bonded job before and the contract price is over $400,000 you will have a difficult time finding any bonding company that will write it.

The City of Mesa and City of Glendale have insurance requirements that exceed what most Cities require. To bid jobs for those cities, you will need to get an estimate on the cost of additional insurance policies as well. Insurance and bonding requirements will be spelled out in the sample contract.