Florida condo boards · milestone repairs
The $70,620 Mistake: Why the Lowest Restoration Bid Often Isn't
Updated August 2026 · 5 minute read
Three bids land on a Florida condo board's table for milestone-driven concrete restoration:
| Bidder | Cover-letter price |
|---|---|
| Bidder A | $752,000 |
| Bidder B | $938,000 |
| Bidder C | $1,247,700 |
Every instinct in the room says Bidder A. The treasurer has already mentioned it in an email. Owners are anxious about a special assessment, and A saves almost $200,000 against B and nearly half a million against C. The vote could happen tonight.
It shouldn't — because those three numbers are not prices for the same job.
What the cover letters don't say
Read against a single unified scope list, the three proposals turn out to cover different work. Bidder A's proposal doesn't carry seven scope lines that the other bidders priced — items like railing replacement, deck waterproofing at the walkways, and engineering support during construction. Some are absent entirely; others sit on the exclusions page in a single sentence. Bidder B is missing two lines. Bidder C priced everything.
None of this is dishonest. Contractors structure proposals differently, and every proposal is written to look complete. But it means the board is about to compare a partial job against a complete one and call the partial one "cheaper."
Level the bids and the answer flips
Leveling means pricing the gaps: for each line a bidder didn't carry, insert a fair market value (the average of the bidders who did price it) and add it to that bidder's total. Now all three numbers describe the same work:
| Bidder A | Bidder B | Bidder C | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Cover-letter price | $752,000 | $938,000 | $1,247,700 |
| Leveling adjustment | +$323,000 | +$77,280 | $0 |
| Adjusted comparable | $1,080,440 | $1,009,820 | $1,247,700 |
Why boards fall for this every time
Because the failure is invisible at decision time. The board saves money on paper, everyone feels responsible, the minutes look prudent. The real cost arrives a year later, in fragments, each change order individually too small to fight. On commercial projects this is exactly why owners pay a construction manager to level bids before award. Volunteer boards handling a $496,000 average repair decision — the current Florida milestone average — mostly don't know the step exists.
The three questions to ask before any award vote
One: does every bid price every line of the engineer's scope, and can each bidder point to where? Two: what is on each bid's exclusions and allowances pages, totalled in dollars? Three: if we add what's missing at the other bidders' prices, who is actually low? If nobody in the room can answer all three, the bids haven't been compared yet — only their cover letters have.
The Florida Milestone Repair Bid Leveling Kit does the leveling above automatically: 23 restoration scope lines, exclusions and allowances logged per bidder, variance flags, a DBPR/HB 913 qualifications checklist, and a board summary that prints for the minutes. The worked example in this article ships inside it as a live demo. $149, no macros, Excel or Google Sheets.
Get the Bid Leveling Kit — $149Related: How to Compare Three Milestone Repair Bids That Don't Match — the full method, step by step.
Integrated Development Advisory LLC is an independent information publisher and is not an engineer, architect, reserve specialist, community association manager, or law firm. This article and the kit are strictly administrative — arithmetic and organization. They do not opine on structural adequacy, required reserves, or statutory compliance. Verify current requirements with your association's licensed professionals.