Grounds and exteriors
Three companies walk the same property and come back with three prices, and none of them will say what they measured. That is not dishonesty on their part — nobody gave them the same ground to price against. Give them one, and the three numbers finally mean the same thing.
What a request needs first
What each trade needs before it can be priced
One trade out of eight
Everything else on this platform publishes from the address you typed. This one does not, because it is the only work whose price comes off the ground itself, and a price off ground nobody agreed on is a price you cannot compare.
You type the address and a boundary comes back already drawn from parcel data over a satellite image of the actual property — the beds, the verges, the strip along the drive, the curb islands, the retention pond bank if it is yours. You adjust the edge where it is wrong. If a property has never come through that pass, or the shape needs drawing by hand instead, that is the fallback, not the only path.
Once it is confirmed, it is the same shape next year and the year after. Every company prices the same shape. Three proposals that answer the same boundary are three numbers you can put beside each other, which is the whole reason to re-bid a grounds contract instead of renewing it out of habit.
Nothing here reports an acreage for a property nobody has confirmed. The starting shape is a draft until you have looked at it; the boundary that prices your contract is the one you signed off.
Asked, not assumed
The same answer the request itself uses
This is the same check the request runs when you publish it, not a separate copy of the rule kept here.
The last row is the one people trip on. A request that covers grounds work and something else is still a request that has to be priced off the ground, so one trade makes the whole request ask for it. Splitting them into two requests is the way round that, and it is a fair thing to do when the other trade is urgent.
One row in the rulebook
Every trade on this platform files general liability and workers’ compensation. Grounds work files a third thing that no other trade is asked for, and the reason is in your parking lot every Tuesday morning: this is the trade that arrives towing something.
The gate
Auto liability · General liability · Workers’ compensation
All three are read off the certificate by a person, with the date each policy runs out, and the dates are watched afterwards rather than at the moment somebody remembers to look.
Trades asked for auto liability
That is the whole list, taken from the rulebook rather than from memory. A trailer on a residential drive, a truck backing past a resident’s car, a mower loaded at the curb: the exposure is real and it belongs to one trade.
You set the limit on each of them. What a packet holds, and what happens the day one lapses, has a page of its own below.
What you publish
An owner who has already written a specification hands you a file; attach it and publish that as the scope. Either way the companies answering price from the sheet you keep.
The line on the published request
This is what the request prints, word for word
Issued through VendoRFP. Vendors send their proposals back on this site. No phone number or email address is published with this RFP.
A grounds contract going back out is the one time a manager's inbox usually fills with sales calls. This is why it does not.
Companies verified for grounds work, carrying the cover you named — a list somebody joined by filing paperwork a person read, months before your request existed.
Frequency, what a visit includes, what is seasonal and priced separately, and who is responsible for irrigation repairs — that last one is where a cheap proposal usually turns out to be the expensive one.
Mowing, edging, bed maintenance and the blow-down, on the frequency your contract names rather than on whatever the last company had time for.
Mulch, pruning, seasonal colour and the clean-up after a storm, priced as their own lines so an owner can see what the extras were.
Building painting, pressure-washing crews and pest treatment around the perimeter are their own trades on this platform, and each goes out to companies cleared for that trade.
Irrigation repair, tree work, snow and lot sweeping are not trades a company holds on this platform, so nothing here puts one of them out for proposals. When your grounds company does them anyway, they are recorded and paid for against the same property file as the contract.
The answers, then the year
A recurring contract is not decided in an afternoon and it is not forgotten afterwards either. Both halves live in the same place.
Each one prices the lines you asked for, says how often the company would attend, and reads in that company’s own words rather than in a form we made them fill in.
The boundary was on the request, so a lower number is a lower number rather than a smaller idea of the property.
Every visit dated, the record the crew filed on the way out, the certificate with its expiration date, and each invoice with the company’s own line items.
The same boundary, the same scope, and last year’s invoices beside the new proposals. Exports as Detailed CSV, General journal CSV (double-entry), QuickBooks Online CSV, QuickBooks Desktop IIF, Xero CSV.
Before you ask
Nothing here is charged per property and nothing is counted against you for adding another one. A manager with one property and a manager with forty publish the same way.
The companies answering pay to be verified, and what that costs them is written on the vendor pricing page. What a buying side can optionally buy is on pricing. Neither is a condition of putting your grounds contract out.