Picture the packet in front of a Lee County board at budget season: one bid at $4,900 a month, one at $6,400, one at $7,800. The instinct is to take the middle number, or the low one with a nervous conscience. But in almost every packet we have ever been part of, the spread is not efficiency — it is scope. The $4,900 bid is mowing 36 times a year with string-trimmed edges and no irrigation checks; the $7,800 bid includes 42 visits, monthly wet checks, and palm work to fourteen feet. Neither is dishonest. They are just answers to different questions.
Comparing line-by-line means refusing to compare totals until every bid describes the same job. That takes one meeting's worth of work with a scope sheet, and it is the single highest-leverage hour a landscape committee spends all year. If you have not issued a formal scope yet, start with our free HOA landscape maintenance RFP template — this guide assumes bids are already on the table.
Step one: force every bid onto the same scope sheet
Build a spreadsheet with one row per scope item and one column per bidder, then make each bidder commit to numbers — visit counts, frequencies, heights, and units — in writing. "Weekly in season" is not a number: in Southwest Florida, one vendor's season is April through October and another's is year-round. A full-scope grounds maintenance program here typically lands around 38 to 42 visits a year; a bid that is silent on the count is usually planning fewer.
| Scope item | What to pin down in every bid |
|---|---|
| Mowing | Annual visit count in writing (38–42 is typical SWFL full-service), cut height, and what happens in the Nov–Mar slow season. |
| Edging | Blade-edged or string-trimmed? Every visit or alternating? Walks, curbs, AND bed lines, or turf edges only? |
| Hedge & shrub trimming | Rotation interval (every 4–6 weeks in season is standard) and whether interior shrubs are included or just street-facing. |
| Bed weeding | Spot-weeding every visit versus a full detail pass — and how often the full pass happens. |
| Irrigation | Is a monthly wet check of every zone included? At what labor rate are repairs billed? Who documents the zones? |
| Mulch & seasonal color | Included in the monthly price or quoted separately? If included, is the bag/yard count stated so you can verify it? |
| Tree & palm care | Included to what height? Per-palm pricing for anything above it? What pruning standard (no "hurricane cuts")? |
| Storm response | Priority terms in writing, response window, and the emergency labor rate — before the storm, not after. |
| Detailing | Litter policing, blow-down, amenity and mailbox areas — with a stated frequency, not "as needed." |
The scope-item checklist. If a bid cannot fill in a cell, that cell is an exclusion — price it accordingly.
The unit-price traps
Most bid-comparison mistakes are not about the monthly number at all. They hide in how the units are written. Four traps account for nearly all of them.
Per-cut versus fixed-monthly math. A per-cut price looks cheap until you annualize it. Forty visits at $175 is $7,000 a year — but so is a $583 fixed month, and the fixed month does not create an incentive to skip the December cut. If a bidder prices per cut, multiply by their committed annual count and divide by twelve before you put it next to a monthly bid.
The "as-needed" line. Any scope line that reads "as needed," "as required," or "at contractor's discretion" is a line the low bidder has priced at zero. Weeding as needed means weeding when someone complains. Convert every as-needed line to a frequency or move it to the extras column of your sheet.
Allowances instead of counts. "Includes mulch allowance" is not a quantity. Mulch should be bid as a counted number of bags or yards per cycle so you can verify installation against the invoice — this is exactly why BCQ publishes mulch at a flat $8 per bag installed, with a pallet defined as 75 bags, so a board can check the count against the property.
The extras rate. A low base bid frequently earns its money back on out-of-scope work. Ask every bidder for their hourly labor rate for extras and their material markup policy, in writing, as part of the bid. If the base price is 15% below the field and the extras rate is 40% above it, you are not looking at a cheaper vendor — you are looking at a different billing strategy.
Mobilization fees and the other lines boards miss
- Mobilization or start-up fees — a one-time charge for coming aboard. Sometimes legitimate on large properties (initial catch-up work is real labor); always worth asking what specifically it buys and whether a documented catch-up week replaces it.
- Fuel or equipment surcharges — percentage adders that float with diesel prices. If present, cap them or price them in.
- Annual escalators — an auto-renewing contract with a CPI-plus-3% escalator quietly outgrows a slightly higher fixed bid by year three. Model all bids across the full term, not year one.
- Trip minimums — a two-hour minimum on every irrigation call turns a $40 nozzle into a $130 visit. Ask how small repairs are batched.
- Dump and haul fees — debris disposal billed per load on top of labor. Fine if disclosed; expensive if discovered.
Normalize the numbers: a five-minute worked example
Once the scope sheet is filled in, do three divisions for each bid. Annual price divided by committed visits gives price per visit. Annual price divided by doors gives cost per door for trend-tracking. And the extras rates go side by side in their own row. Then sanity-check the unit prices against published book rates — BCQ posts ours publicly: maintenance labor at $65/hr, install labor at $80/hr, sod at $1.25/SF installed, concrete curbing at $10/LF, and mulch at $8/bag installed. A bid whose units sit far outside posted market rates in either direction deserves a question, not a guess.
Red flags that outrank any price column
- No certificate of insurance offered with the bid — COI and W-9 should arrive before you ask.
- Refusal to commit to visit counts or unit rates in writing.
- No references from communities of comparable size in Lee, Collier, or Charlotte County.
- A first-year price that only makes sense with the escalator and auto-renewal attached.
- No named crew or account contact — "whoever is routed that day" is how missed weeks happen.
Before you sign anything, put every finalist through the same short interview — we keep our list in questions to ask every landscape bidder before you sign. And if your board wants a bid that is already formatted for line-by-line comparison, that is how BCQ quotes by default: our HOA landscaping programs are itemized by scope with the visit counts and unit rates on the page, and property managers get the same format ready to forward to the board packet. Send us your scope and we will bid it line for line — request a quote below, or call or text (239) 799-5594.