Vendor Selection Process

ANV is a builder that focuses on the actual house building process. It does not perform land engineering and site preparation services. It has close relationships with companies that provide these services and it has placed some of these companies on its recommended vendors list. Home owners are free to use these vendors or select other companies that they feel comfortable with.

Land Engineering
ANV has one vendor on its list of recommended vendors for land engineering services. Services included in land engineering are preparation of the grading plan, land surveys, site stakeout, etc.

Although we were free to use other vendors if we so desired, we decided to use LAND Engineering PLC, which is the company that's on ANV's list. Normally, we shop around and review the competition before we hire a company to perform work for us. We didn't go through a review process in this case, since time was of the essence and we wanted work on the grading plan to start as soon as possible.

Site Preparation
ANV has two vendors on its list of recommended vendors for site preparation work. Site preparation includes the demolition of the existing house, excavation of foundation, putting in place a bio-retention filtration system, etc. We decided to also consider two other reputable vendors in the area since we had time to perform a review while we were waiting for the grading plan to be approved by the county.

We contacted all four vendors and asked for estimates. Our objective was to select the company that:

• Is reputable and does good work
• Offers a good price
• Has good customer service
• Has a good relationship with ANV since the work requires a lot of coordination with the builder.

Since we are new to the house building process, we had to do some research on the Internet so that we could understand some of the terms used in the estimates we received. Since the vendors used different terms in their estimates, and they also didn't include the same items, we had to make sure that we just don't compare the total figures but that we do a thorough line item by line item comparison to ensure that we do an apples to apples comparison and our analysis was objective. We then documented the differences, prepared our questions and scheduled meetings with the vendors to go over their estimates.

The meetings were very helpful to us. Not only did they help us understand the whole process better, but they also gave us the opportunity to have a face to face interaction with the vendors which is a more valuable form of communication than electronic communication.

Two of the vendors we contacted were very responsive so we met with them first. One of the two is on ANV's recommended list, the other one is not. As noted earlier, the meetings were very helpful. After the meetings, we asked them to make some revisions and continued the negotiation process for the next couple of weeks. We also contacted the vendors' references and asked some questions to better understand the kind of experience other home owners had with them.

One of these two vendors (the one that's not on ANV's recommended list) gave us the best price. We got really close to giving him the business based on the best price he gave us and based on the fact that he has a reputable company that has been in the business for a long time. But in the end, we decided to go with the vendor that didn't necessarily offer us the cheapest price but provided us outstanding customer service, has great reputation based on its services to former clients, and the the one we felt most comfortable with. That company is Country Excavating. The fact that they are on ANV's recommended vendors list also weighed in on our decision since good vendor relationships with the builder allows for smooth coordination at various stages of the project.