Questions to Ask a Renovation Contractor in Mallorca
Key takeaways
- Ask every company the same questions, in the same order.
- What the answer tells you matters more than whether it is the answer you wanted.
- A question somebody will not answer in writing has been answered anyway.
- Ask what has been excluded. It is the most useful question on the list.
Most of these take a minute to answer and the differences between the answers explain most of the differences between the prices. Ask all of them of everybody, and write the answers down beside each other.
About the job itself
| Question | What the answer tells you |
|---|---|
| What have you excluded from this price? | The most useful question on the page. A company that answers it clearly has read the job; one that says nothing is excluded has not. |
| Does this assume the electrical and plumbing installations stay or go? | The single largest variable. If two quotes differ here they are not comparable at all. |
| What have you assumed about the structure? | Whether the price is built on a survey or on hope. |
| What do you expect to find once the walls are open? | Experience. A company that has worked on property of this age has a specific answer. |
| How have you priced getting materials in and waste out? | Whether they have actually looked at the access. |
About who does what
| Question | What the answer tells you |
|---|---|
| Which parts are subcontracted, and who holds those contracts? | Where responsibility sits when something between two trades goes wrong. |
| Who is my single point of contact, and who covers when they are away? | Whether the project survives one person being on holiday. |
| What do you expect this work to need, and who arranges it? | Whether the technical side is inside the price or waiting for you. |
| Have you worked on this kind of property before? | Ask about the property type, not about years in business. The specific answer is the useful one. |
About how it will run
| Question | What the answer tells you |
|---|---|
| How often will I hear from you, and in what form? | Whether silence will mean progress or a problem. |
| What happens to the price when something is found? | Whether variations are a process or an argument. |
| How are payments staged, and against what? | Whether payment follows progress or the calendar. |
| Which items have long lead times, and when will they be ordered? | Whether the finish date is understood or hoped for. |
| What does handover include? | Whether you get certificates and a record, or just a finished room. |
| What happens if something appears three months later? | How the relationship ends, which is worth knowing at the start. |
What not to bother asking
How long the company has been trading tells you very little, and it is easy to answer impressively. Whether they can start next week tells you about their order book rather than their quality, and the good companies here are usually the busy ones. A single reference chosen by the company is worth less than a specific answer to any question above.
How to use the answers
- Put them side by side. The pattern is more informative than any single reply.
- Notice who asked you questions back. It is usually the company that has read the job.
- Notice who put things in writing without being pressed.
- Treat a refusal to answer as an answer, because it is one.
- Then compare the totals, last rather than first.
The owner-side version of this is the renovation checklist, and the questions specific to a managed arrangement are on turnkey renovation.
Is it rude to ask all of this?
No, and companies that work on substantial projects expect it. The ones that find it irritating are telling you something useful about how the project would go.
How many companies should I ask?
Enough that the answers form a pattern, which in practice is around three. Two gives you a disagreement with no tiebreak; many more is work for you and rarely changes the picture.
What if one is much cheaper?
Go back to the exclusions question. A large gap is usually a difference in what is included rather than a difference in rate, and the exclusions are where the surprises live.
Should I ask for references?
You can, and weight them lightly, since the company chooses which ones you get. A specific answer about your kind of property tells you more than a satisfied stranger does.
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