TENDERING SERVICES ON LINE

OUR SERVICE TO BUILDING CONTRACTORS:

Tendering Services was established in 1949 after consultations between the Master Builders Association and the local Chapter of Quantity Surveyors as a service for subcontractors wishing to tender to builders on a regular basis on contracts in the Western Cape Area.

While acknowledging that our service is primarily arranged around the needs of subcontractors the benefit for main building contractors is obvious. The one area in which we have found problems is in obtaining a comprehensive list of builders pricing the project which can then be passed on to the subcontractor.. Originally there was a great deal of resistance to this by the professional fraternity on the basis that builders would be able to get together and arrange prices if aware of who their competitors are, but in this day and age if anything, builders are more likely to give better prices if they know which other contractors they are pricing against. In any case main contractors can always establish who their competition will be at the project site meeting, without any help from us.

While it has become the practice of most quantity surveyors to supply us with a full list of builders supplied with documents, when only a few contractors have been invited to tender, we still have to rely on the builders themselves advising us of their intention to tender on open tenders. Often we have to wait a few days after the documents are released in order to build up a healthy number of names on our lists and invariably we find that after printing and distributing our information other builders will draw documents and we have to send out supplementary notices to our subcontractors which is not ideal from anyone's point of view.

After completing our side of the process and distributing extracts to our subcontractors we will often receive calls from builders who experience difficulty in getting prices for certain trades, especially in the case where we were advised of their intention to tender too late to include their names on our original lists. Our service is aimed primarily in bringing together builders and subcontractors pricing tenders and although queries of this sort are time consuming we have always tried to help.

In order to cater for all of the above our service to the main contractors is as follows:

1. Advise us immediately of your intention to tender on a project and we will pass your name on to the approximately 300 subcontractors who subscribe to our service. This service is totally FREE to all builders and only takes a phone call.

2. We offer an "early warning " system for builders who need to be reminded that we are about to start processing a certain tender. We will fax information of projects which we are about to process as soon as we receive information of the contract. This will serve as a reminder if a builder has forgotten to advise us of their interest in a project, and also keeps builders informed of contracts in progress in our area which ' they may have missed.

3. We supply main contractors who have advised us of their intention to price a project with a printout of our service to subcontractors showing which pages were extracted and sent to which subcontractors. This enables the main contractor to follow up subcontractors who have perhaps forgotten to submit their prices to him and also serves as a double check on all concerned that the pages that we have extracted for a particular trade correspond with the items which the builder needs to be priced.

THE SERVICE FOR ITEMS 2 AND 3 IS AVAILABLE ON SUBSCRIPTION ONLY AND A NOMINAL CHARGE OF R900.00 p.a. IS LEVIED TO COVER OUR COSTS.

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TENDERING SERVICES BUREAU P.O.Box 776, Durbanville. 7551. Tel - 021 914-7001 Fax - 021 914-5226 e-mail brian@tenderingservices.co.za