Estimating labor costs for an in-house crew is the most severe challenge facing estimators, says David Gerstel in his third installment of a great 4-part JLC series on estimating and bidding. Instead of basing labor productivity on publicly available cost catalogues or job cost records, Gerstel recommends that builders rely on a five-word phrase: Narrative Historical Labor Productivity Records.
Gerstel explains that a productivity record is a kind of a narrative telling the story of an installation, and includes characters, time, and place—the crew that did the work, the time it took them to complete the work, and the site where they performed the work. Crucially, the record boils time down to a unit cost, which in this case is hours per linear foot, that can be used in future estimates.