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General Contracting
The traditional and most used method, until recently, of securing the services of a contractor is General Contracting.
This method requires the owner to first completely design his/her project and develop a set of specifications to go with them. Next, an advertisement of the bid is placed in local newspapers announcing that the owner is taking construction bids and that these bids will be due in his/her or the architect's office by a certain date and time.
Sometimes the owner may skip this process and use a pre-selected group of contractors which he/she would invite to bid on the project. On bid day all offers are clocked in and then opened. If this project was a government project, the numbers would be read out loud for everyone to hear. In private bids they are rarely shared with any outside party.
With the government bid, the lowest bid will be awarded the project, provided that the cost offered has covered all the required items. This may not be the case for private bids. Here the owner can select who he/she feels is the best contractor with the best price.
There are several pro's and con's to this method of construction. The pro's are that the owner can get low cost numbers on projects, the con's are many. First, this is a slow process, there usually is an up-front design cost, the owner doesn't provide any insight or input during the design phase, change orders are usually frequent and can be expensive, and most importantly, low cost doesn't always mean the best cost.
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