Am I the only one who does not send construction documents to plan rooms?

[KingKongdoor]

Trying to determine the best method to issue plans to contractors for bids? Current method is to publish an ad for public projects and send out a mass email to all the reputable GC's in my area. Is it old school for me to want to control the distribution of the construction documents and any addendums and know what contractors have these plans. Should I change my method and give in to the constant harassment from plan rooms?

 

[phamENG]

I don't usually run the advertising and bidding of projects, but on those that I have, I've followed one of two approaches:

1) Reach out to reputable contractors that are qualified for the job and that I think would be a good fit for the project and gauge their interest. If enough say yes, then we limit the bidding pool to those contractors. Documents are sent out, and all correspondence carefully tracked to maintain integrity of the information to the bidding parties. (This only works for private jobs, and "enough" is a discussion with the owner.)

2) If it's a public job or there's not "enough" bidders in #1, then it goes out broadly. BUT, I put a restriction in the specs that states that you either have to a) attend a mandatory prebid meeting or b) state your intention to bid by such-and-such a date. Once that date passes, the bidders who have signed up are on the list and correspondence with those bidders is tracked to maintain integrity. If a bidder not on the list sends in a bid, too bad. This method doesn't always work for public projects, so in those cases the addenda are carefully tracked and all bids are required to list the latest revision and date of the drawings used as well as all addenda received and incorporated into the bid. That way we know that the bids received are all based on the same info.