Miami Construction Estimating Services

Miami doesn’t price like anywhere else. You know that already.

The building stock is old and the county keeps checking it. Miami-Dade has run a building recertification program since 1975, and it was amended on 1 June 2022 to line up with Florida’s milestone inspection law, which took effect on 26 May 2022 for condo and co-op buildings three stories and taller. Coastal buildings within three miles of the water, built between 1983 and 1997, had to recertify by 31 December 2024 and go again every ten years. Newer coastal buildings start at 25 years. Everything else built from 1993 on starts at 30. Once the notice lands, the owner has 90 days.

That’s not trivia. That’s a pipeline. Every one of those buildings turns into repair scope, and somebody has to price it.

It doesn’t catch everything, and that matters when you’re chasing work. Single-family homes are out. Duplexes are out. So is any building with an occupant load of ten or fewer. The program is aimed squarely at multi-family and commercial stock, which is where the repair dollars sit anyway.

The code underneath it keeps moving too. The Florida Building Commission is running the 2026 code update right now, with tracking charts published as it goes. If you’re pricing a job that permits next year, you’re pricing against a moving target. We watch it because we have to.

The code is statewide, so a lot of this applies wherever you build – our Florida construction estimating services page covers the state-level picture. What follows is the part that’s Miami-Dade’s alone.

Then there’s product approval. Miami-Dade runs it as its own permitting track, right alongside impact fees, Certificate of Use and Notice of Commencement. If you’re bidding openings, roofing or anything that has to hold in a storm, you’re going to be pricing approved assemblies, not whatever’s cheapest in the catalog.

We’re a cost estimator that works in this market every week. Not a national shop guessing at it from a spreadsheet.

Here’s the practical problem. Miami bids move fast and the good ones are crowded. You get a set of drawings, a date, and four other contractors chasing the same job. Pricing it properly takes days you don’t have. Pricing it badly takes months you can’t get back. Most contractors we talk to aren’t short on work. They’re short on the hours to bid it.

We don’t quote industry averages. We quote our own book.

Across Miami-Dade County we’ve estimated 468 projects worth $794.9M. We’ve read the PDFs on 464 of them, and those carry 76,234 individually priced line items. That’s the database your bid gets priced from.

The shape of it matters more than the total. The median Miami-Dade project we price is $611K. The 90th percentile is $3.7M. So most of this work is mid-market – the job that’s too big to eyeball and too small to carry a full-time estimator. That’s exactly who we’re built for.

Why does the median matter more than the headline? Because a $611K job and a $96M job aren’t the same document. The big one gets phased, escalated and value-engineered. The mid-market job gets priced once and has to be right. Most of what we do in Miami-Dade is the second kind.

By trade, our Miami line items run heaviest in drywall (12,815), concrete (11,564) and masonry (2,392), then painting (1,655). Structural steel (411) and demolition (192) are thin, and we’ll say so rather than pretend otherwise. If you need a steel-only takeoff in Miami, ask us first. We’ll tell you honestly whether our book supports it.

These are real estimates. Open any of them above – the numbers are ours, the dates are removed, nothing else is touched.

1. 72nd Street Community, Miami Beach – $96.3M. Our largest in the market, 12 miles from downtown Miami. 2. Normandy Drive, Miami Beach – $3.7M. Sits right on the county’s median-to-P90 band. 3. Keystone, Miami Beach – $2.5M. Just under 10 miles out. 4. Streetwater Self-Storage Building, Miami – $599K. Four miles from the core, and almost exactly our median Miami-Dade project. 5. Restaurant Interior/Exterior Renovation, Miami – $3.1M. A mile and a half out. 6. Restaurant Improvement, Miami – $1.4M. 7. Su Restaurant, Miami – $963K. 8. Intimissimi Store, Miami – $119K. Small tenant fit-out, priced the same way as the $96M job.

We keep these on the page on purpose. Anyone can claim a number. Very few will show you the estimate it came from.

Every figure above is the whole project value, not one trade’s scope. Three of the four full projects are Miami Beach jobs, and they’re labelled that way – all of them inside 12 miles.

There’s no mystery to it. You send plans, we send a number.

1. We read the drawings. All of them. Not the cover sheet and a guess. 2. We take off quantities by division. Everything gets counted, measured and listed. No allowances hiding whole scopes. 3. We price off our own Miami-Dade line items. 76,234 of them, from jobs we actually estimated in this county. Not a national average adjusted by a city factor. 4. We hand you the file, not a summary. Line items, quantities, unit costs, markups. You can argue with any line, and clients do.

That last part is the point. If you can’t see the line, you can’t defend the bid. And if you can’t defend the bid, you’re going to get beaten by somebody who can.

Most bids come back in 6-9 business days. Bigger and stranger jobs take longer, and we’ll tell you that up front instead of missing the date.

Four things we see cost people bids.

1. Recertification scope creep. A repair job on a 30-year-old building isn’t the drawing. It’s the drawing plus whatever the inspection report found. 2. Approved assemblies priced as generic. Product approval isn’t a formality here. Substituting on price and fixing it at inspection costs more than pricing it right. 3. Existing conditions in occupied buildings. Miami does a lot of interior work in buildings nobody empties out. Phasing, after-hours, protection – it’s real money. 4. Coastal exposure on the schedule. Hurricane season runs June through November. A schedule that ignores it isn’t a schedule.

If you’re bidding fast and skipping these, you’re going to win the job and lose the margin.

We estimate across the whole county, not just the city line. Our own project set covers Miami, Miami Beach, Hialeah, Coral Gables, Doral, Aventura, North Miami, North Miami Beach, Miami Gardens, Homestead, Key Biscayne, Sunny Isles Beach, Miami Lakes, South Miami, Palmetto Bay, Cutler Bay, Opa-locka and Miami Springs.

Ground-up, restaurant and retail build-outs, tenant improvements, renovations. If it’s in Miami-Dade and it needs a number, we’ve probably priced something like it.

We work for general contractors, subcontractors, developers and owners. GCs come to us when three bids are due the same week. Subs come to us when the GC’s quantities look wrong and they need their own number to argue with. Developers come to us early, before there’s a full set, when the question is whether the deal works at all.

None of that requires you to be in Miami. Half our clients aren’t. It requires the pricing to be from Miami, and that’s the part we can prove.

Most bids come back in 6-9 business days. Send us the plans and we’ll tell you what we can do.