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Help pricing this.

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Cameronmalson1985

Well-known member
Messages
119
Location
South Wales
I know I don’t have much info on this but could I please have some help pricing this. I know it would help if I had measurements but i don’t. Just a very rough guide would be some help

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U really need to go and see it but roughly I would say £75 for all the whites & windows extra £20 on top then £15 thereafter

 
the first three words were "whats your price" if I had that i'd be on my backfoot thinking they are going for cheapness and shopping around not looking for a quality job but a cheap job,it would be better getting the address and popping round to look and see what you are up against-this usually works for me as you'll meet the owner and build a rapport and seal the deal there and then

 
I agree with @kevinc250 @Cameronmalson1985. The other issue is that cleaners responding to a 'how much would you charge' question from the south of the country get prices much higher than those of us in the north. If you live in an area where windies are still charging 25 bob for a 3 bed semi window clean, then you are wasting your time quoting 'south' prices.

You need to find out exactly what the customer actually wants as well. What does cleaning gutters mean? Does he just want the outside cleaned or does he want them emptied as well? If he wants them clearing, can you do that and are all the gutters easily reached? Have you got equipment to clear a gutter that access is restricted by a conservatory? 

My suggestion to you as a new wfp cleaner is to try to figure out how long it will take you to do the job and work from there. Break the job up into small sections such as front, side, back and garage. Then add the time of each section together. (Take a note pad.) So if you think the job is going to take an hour and you want £25 an hour then the base price is £25. You would then add an extra allowance for miscalculation - in our example, add half an hour.

Then you need to take into consideration that you will also have to clean their windows after you have cleaned the fascias and soffits. If its a one off customer, then this is to be treated as a one off initial clean.

In our part of the world we have a company offering gutter clearing only using a gutter vac and generator. A 3 bed detached house with garage was £65 two years ago which the owner beat them down to £45. It was two runs of guttering on each side of the house and another run the length of the built on garage. He didn't ask us to clear gutters thankfully as we didn't have a gutter vac back then, but he asked us to clean the gutters and fascias on our next window cleaning visit. That took us an hour and a half and we had some arm aching sections above the attached garage to reach.

So your pricing calculation would be;

gutter clearing into total   =  2 hours

FSG cleaning   = 1 hour

window cleaning   = 1 hour.

add on for unaccounted for issues  = .5 hour.

So you could expect to take 4.5 hours at £25 = £112.50 or £115.00

Now in our area the customer would take a price like that as an insult even although there is nothing wrong about that. With our example customer, the gutter clearing company was prepared to negotiate after the customer told him that there is no way he would pay £65 for that job. Had we got the job we might have got away with £90 to do the lot including washing the windows. But I would never have done that job off ladders as the neighbours fence is too close to the house on the far side. You wouldn't have been able to see that if you didn't visit the customer and go through the issues with him.

Long term, is it worth going in at a cheaper price to get the work, the work experience and the quote experience in your area. If you have no work on does it matter if a £90 job took you twice as long as you estimated as you need to learn the cleaning technique to clean FSGs. Or would your time be better spent canvassing for window cleaning jobs?

Just because you did a few jobs under the 'accepted' price, does this mean you will have to stick to that in future? No. If that customer asks for a reclean in a few years time, you will have the experience to quote more accurately. You will also then be able to walk away from a repeat job that the customer won't accept your new price for as you will have a lot more work.

Will still clean one of our early FSG clear and clean quotes on an annual basis. The price has gone up by 100% since I first did the job and the time taken has reduced by 50%. We used a gutter vac for the first time last year and we better know how to tackle the job from previous experience.

When I first started wfp, I didn't have enough work. I was happy to take on some work from another cleaner to give me experience at wfp cleaning. Over the next few months I converted that section of his round from trad to wfp as well so all of these were initial cleans. I wasn't earning much from doing this, but I put the experience I was gaining as a worthwhile compromise.

After 3 months I chose to hand the work back to him so I had time to canvass for my own work.

 
Last edited by a moderator:
£1500 without looking at it.  

Measurements are no use either.

Unless you have seen the property and assessed the access, current condition, 'reachability'etc of the gutters you may as well keep plucking numbers out of thin air. 

 
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