In commercial construction, the gap between a job that finishes on time and on budget and one that bleeds into costly change orders usually traces back to a single point in the timeline: how carefully the team estimated the work before anyone broke ground.
At HAGGERTY, a general contractor that builds hotels, commercial office, industrial, and mixed-use projects across Northern California, the estimating team treats pre-construction as one of the most consequential phases of the entire job. A reliable number depends on field experience, trusted trade partnerships, and a deep bank of institutional knowledge.
We sat down with James Galarneau, HAGGERTY Senior Estimator, to learn how the team manages cost, where hidden risk tends to hide, and why it refuses to compromise on transparency with clients.
It Starts Before The Bid: Understanding Where The Project Came From
When a new project lands on James’s desk, his first move isn’t to open a spreadsheet. It’s to understand the relationship behind the opportunity.
“The main thing I look for is where did it come from? Because that’s going to dictate how we bid the project: an existing client, business development, a referral, or a cold bid from a lead site. That’s going to adjust the priority of the project and how we bid it.”
That instinct reflects a broader belief at Haggerty: estimating isn’t a mechanical exercise. Every project arrives with a relationship, a timeline, and a set of expectations, and the team has to understand all of it before the pricing work begins.
Bid it Like You’re Going To Build it
One of the most common ways an estimate goes wrong is pricing a project off what the plans show, without accounting for how the work actually comes together in the field. James came up through the trades before moving into pre-construction, and he works differently.
“I like to say bid it like we’re going to build it. I came from the trades, so I understand how things are built. I always try to price the way things are going to be built, not necessarily how they are on the plans.”
That field-first habit separates a number that holds up from one that falls apart during buyout. Haggerty’s estimating group brings together people from a range of trade backgrounds, including electrical, mechanical, and framing, so the team catches scope gaps at the bid stage instead of discovering them halfway through construction.
Where The Hidden Risk Really Lives: The Handoff
Ask an experienced pre-construction professional where financial risk peaks across a project, and you tend to get the same answer: the handoff from estimating to the project team. James says it plainly.
“As estimators, we’ve been in the project for three, four, or five weeks. We know every nook and cranny and we’ve had multiple conversations with core trade partners. The biggest risk financially is that all the information we have gets fully downloaded to the project team.”
Haggerty’s answer is a structured handoff review. Estimators, project managers, superintendents, and ownership sit in the same room and work through the project page by page. The point is to make sure the crew heading into the field carries the same depth of understanding as the people who priced the work, and to catch what any single set of eyes would miss.
Catching Scope Gaps Before They Become Change Orders
Scope gaps, the grey areas where one trade’s responsibility ends and another’s begins, are where commercial projects get expensive fast. Who connects the condensate line in a hotel room, the HVAC contractor or the plumber? Who installs the bollards around a transformer, the electrician or the concrete sub? On paper these look like small questions. Multiply them across a hundred hotel rooms or a full industrial facility, and the exposure is real.
“You have to understand these simple misses on paper, but they can be tens of thousands of dollars in the field once it’s done.”
Haggerty designs its pre-construction work to surface those gaps early. James and his team read every plan page, draw on more than a decade of experience with the coordination failures that tend to crop up between architects and MEP engineers, and pull in input from across the company before a bid goes out the door.
Core Trade Partnerships: The Backbone of Competitive, Reliable Pricing
One thing that sets HAGGERTY apart is the depth of its relationships with core trade partners. These aren’t transactional vendor arrangements; they’re working partnerships built on mutual trust and steady communication.
“We’re in constant contact with our core trade partners during the bid process. And if I have a good relationship with one that isn’t bidding a certain project, I can still call them and ask, ‘What do you think about this?’ They’re there to help us, just as we’re there to help them.”
That network also helps HAGGERTY handle one of the trickier variables in estimating: subcontractor capacity. A framing crew already committed to three HAGGERTY projects can stretch to five, but performance suffers across all of them. The estimating team watches sub capacity and has honest conversations with partners about their bandwidth before making commitments.
Transparency As A Competitive Advantage
In a market where some contractors bid low to win the work and then claw margin back through change orders, HAGGERTY takes the opposite approach. Showing clients exactly what their project costs, and why, is both a core value and a deliberate business strategy.
“We don’t mark our subs up on the sub line of our proposals. We show them our fee, our insurance rate, our GCs, and here are the actual sub costs. I’ll hand them the proposals. Here are three or four more that were higher, and here’s why we chose what we chose.”
This open-book habit builds durable client relationships and keeps bids honest. When a client understands how HAGGERTY reached a number, and why it holds up, they’re in a far better position to make informed decisions about their project.
Value Engineering: Timing Is Everything
Value engineering, finding smarter ways to build without giving up quality or schedule, is one of the most useful tools in pre-construction. But as James points out, it only works if it happens at the right moment.
“Value engineering is most effective during design and pre-construction,” he says. “Once you’re into construction, any change affects the schedule.”
A concrete example: HAGGERTY regularly recommends prefabricated framed walls on hotel projects. They cost a little more upfront, but they can cut framing time by 50 to 60 percent, which lets a hotel owner open months earlier and start generating revenue sooner. That kind of early call comes from a pre-construction team with real field experience behind it.
What Makes An Estimate Reliable
At the close of the conversation, we asked James for the simplest possible answer to a complicated question: what makes an estimate reliable?
“It has to be reliable. No bids are going to be perfect, but we go through and make sure we cover as much of it as possible, that everybody reviews it at once. It’s a team effort.”
That team effort, drawn from field experience, trade relationships, cross-functional reviews, and hard lessons banked across a deep backlog, is what HAGGERTY Construction brings to every job, whether it’s a hotel, an office building, an industrial facility, or a mixed-use development.