Looking for help with pricing

[George Walnut]

Hey guys,

We just got a job to clear out 36 thousand board feet worth of standing trees from a local golf course. The trees are located in an 80 acre forested plot on the golf course with nice trails running through for easy machine access. There is hard maple, beech, basswood, cherry, oak and cedar. They want all the trees cut into sections for milling or cut into small sections for firewood, and the rest put through a chipper for mulch. We guess there may be 80-100 selected trees in total for cutting.

We are a furniture company that does our own logging, but usually we only cut down 2-3 trees at a time, so with a job this large we are having trouble deciding on what to charge.

We have all the machines/equipment necessary for the job.

Looking for some advice from the more experienced loggers out there in terms of what to charge!

We have heard everything from $25 an hour up to $500+ per tree!

Thanks,
George

[beenthere]

They want all the trees cut into sections for milling

That implies, to me, that you won't be getting the trees to mill.  Sounds like a logging job that you are not experienced with so need to find a logger to work with who is experienced. Yet you say you are a company that does your own logging.  ??   :

I may be missing something here, but a bit confused that you "just got a job to clear out 36 mbf of standing trees, and don't know what to charge.  Why would someone give you a job without knowing what the charge will be to them?? 

No offense, but seems we need some info to help you figure this out.

[George Walnut]

Sorry for the lack of information in my first post. The golf course has contacted us to remove the trees in order to use the lumber to renovate the club house. We have a go ahead on all the work and all that is left to do is to give them a price for the actual cutting of the trees. Normally we only remove select hardwood trees for free in exchange for the lumber, but with this project we are using the lumber to renovate the new buildings so there will be no opportunity to exchange.

We rarely charge for logging/tree removal so with such a large "paying" logging job we are slightly hesitant to give too low/high of a price.

We have the right amount of experience and skill for the actual work, just not the quoting part.

Unfortunately I have no good contacts for logging in my area so I have no one to call for estimates.

Let me know if I have missed anything!

[Ianab]

First you need to know your costs?

Labour, machinery operating costs etc. You need to know what it's costing your per hour to do the job. Now that might be $25 an hour for the guy with the chainsaw? What about the chipper and the 2 or 3 guys running that? The skidder, loader, tractor or excavator and it's operator? $50, $100?.

Once you have that you can estimate how many trees per hour (or hours per tree?) and have some idea what to charge.

What someone else would charge isn't the thing. If your operation is costing $150 hr to run, and you only charge $100, then the more work you do, the more $$ you loose. If you know it's costing $150, and you are charging out $200, then you have a plan that should get you ahead.

Ian

[Rick Alger]

I agree with Ianab, but if you're looking for some low-end figures to frame your bid, here's what I ran into a while back in NH. Cut and skid around $100 per thousand and $40 per cord. Buck into firewood and pile $25 per cord. Chip $25 per ton.