First Estimate

[owen bryant]

Hello everyone, well it happend, someone called and wanted an estimate on cutting their grass, it is aprox 1/3 acre and is flat with a few trees, he said he wanted someone to keep the yard up, I figured aprox 1 hour to do it, and four times a month, I am looking at a rate of $150.00 a month, does this sound right? Thanks for any input, I have alot of new equipment to pay off including a hustler super z, so I don't want to do it for free.

[65hoss]

Guess that depends. What else do you have to do other than mow??

If its 1/3 acre and you only mow then $37.50 per cut isn't bad.

Buying a new super z isn't going to be paid for cutting 1/3 acre lots. You need big stuff to pay for that machine.

[bruces]

Don't forget, a month is 4.33 weeks, not 4 weeks, don't sell yourself short.

[LAWNS AND MOWER]

Maybe you might want to consider pricing jobs per/cut instead of per/month. New customers might question why yard was only mowed 3 times in a month due to a drought or if you get alot of rain and fall behind. Just a thought.

LAWNS AND MOWER

[lawnkid]

That's a bit expensive for just mowing. I cut mostly yards about a half acre and I charge that much for mowing,trimming,edging, and a clean-up. Buuying an expensive mower right away wasn't the smartest thing to do. Shoulda bought a good used mower. Get accounts secured, then go for the top stuff. Good Luck

[kutnkru]

For our area your calculations would be light. If you have basically a 15m/sf property with minimal trimming you are probably going to have your trimming/edging/blowing complete within 15 minutes even during the heaviest growing times.

If you figured light (dollarwise) for the trimming/blowing services you are still looking at basically $5.50 (.37/min). This means that you are cutting the property for $32 (.71/min).

When you break these numbers down what you are projecting is that trimmers and blowers are going to cost you almost 1/2 the amount it costs you to run an $8k(+/-) state of the art mowing machine. I Think Not~LOL!!!

At these prices if you want to make a profit you cannot afford to pay yourself - even if the biz is run from your garage to start off with.

If you are figuring roughly 37 cents per minute for trimming/edging/blowing then I would guesstimate that you should be charging approximately $1.25/min for mowing these sized lots.

Just my .02
Kris

[_GUNNER_8]

lawnkid,
its part-timmers like u or wannabes that screw pricing up.price varys in certain areas and if ur doing everything legit anywhere from $45 to $60 hour.

[Bassman]

With experience you should be able to check out any property and be pretty much right on with estimating the time it will take to do the job. (There are always the rare exception). Then use your base dollar amount per hour depending on what you need to receive in order to pay for overhead and whatever profit margin. Like a previous poster said, different area's of the country dictate different rates, (you may want $60/Hr. but if the norm in your community is for the most part used to good service by reputable LCO's at $40/Hr. you have your work cut out.)