I think that square foot pricing is just an unrealistic way to estimate. If you can't get the acreage, look at the lawn, and know exactly what it should cost you don't know your business or your market. Profit is maximized by doing a quality job with the right equipment to mow quickly and efficiently. Just my .02
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Do you mean per thousand?

By the sq ft we're around .0014 cents..........
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I don't charge per sq foot...but then again I don't go on a forum and ask what everyone else charges to get a price. I know my costs.

Let's say I tell you I charge $0.0015 per sq foot and my profit is half that..........you charge $0.0015 per sq foot but your costs are different than mine........your profit will be different.

Figure out your business instead of what other businesses are charging.

Hate to sound like a jerkwad broken record but if I did, I could have a 30% profit vs another guy charging the same price and he gets 50% or another guy gets 20%.

There is no "rough estimate" for you to go by.

 

Between about $0.75 and $7 per thousand sf. The low end would be a 2 acre empty lot with no trimming. High end would be itty bitty $25 or $30 lawns.
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Often tiny lawns are absolute obstacle courses.
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One hundred dollars.

 

time can basically figured by square foot.

I had a set of table all figured out back in the early 90s that had every conceivable piece of equipment listed and its mowing times

Excel 10' wing mower, easy, medium, hard

61" scag Sthm easy, medium, hard.

I had these numbers that were crazy decimals , that if you multiplied them by the square foot your measured, it would give you and estimated time.

for example, a 48" belt drive walk behind was .000048 for hard.

so if you had a "hard difficulty" acre you multiplied 43560 by .000048…this was complied by doing it over and over again and figuring out what the average times were, and then dividing out the square feet to get these tiny thousandths of a number.
I don't use it anymore, because Ztrs and modern mowers have simplified this process…
but the numbers for 48" belt drive walk behind as still fairly relative.

so my hard difficulty number up there tell me a 48" belt drive walk behind will take 2 hours to cut that acre.

consulting a more modern mowing calculator, for a 48 inch belt WB says an acre at 4 mph and 80% efficiency is 39 minutes. That's a very easy square, with no obstacles to speak of.

so as you can see, times can vary quite a bit, depending on the circumstances of how that acre is laid out.
but if you took 39 minutes and made it into a decimal of hours, it's .65 per 43560 or .0000149.

So if you had your "easy" 48 WB at .0000149 and your hard 48 wb at .000048, you would have to decide if this was an easy job or a medium job or a hard one.
depending on how that Sqft was laid out… medium, obviously being an average of the two

But you see If Im looking at this lawn, figuring out how much time tis going to take me with a 48 belt wb, some other dude might just be looking at this planning to use a 60" ZTR…


Thats going to be a whole different set of numbers!

so you can't say…that that sqft has a certain price tag on it and thats what sq ft costs no matter how you do it.

because you could mow that whole thing with a 21 and totally loose money.

you have to charge for your time, and not the space.
People keep tripping up over that.
We aren't buying real estate here, we're maintaing it…. different game.

even two guys with the same 48 Wb might some up with a different price, If I charge $50 for my wb and he charges $60.

Im $100 and he's $120.
so my price per acre is $.00229 and his is $.00275

BUT it's the same acre.
so this forum ale you are trying to find won't work.
you can use it to find time semi reliably but not price.

what happens when you come up to 10000 sq ft and use this formulae?
That's $22 for a quarter acre, can you even make money that low?

what about 7500 square feet? are you really going to charge $17 for the cut?

So as you can see you can't use the formulae you want to know, for what you are trying to use it for.

It's just basically nonsense.

 

My smallest lawn almost no grass 1500 sf can take just as long as 16000sf

 

I feel the eyeball is much more efficient that measuring for residential properties but I've been doing it for years.

I would start tracking times it takes you to mow each property you currently have. Use those to compare new quote request.

So.... You cut mrs smiths lawn for $35 and you feel like you make good money. You get a new call and their lawn is very similar to ms smiths but it's more wide open or has fenced lawn. Simply adjust the new quote price based on what you've learned from ms smiths.

It takes time and attempts. Eventually up you will hopefully get to a point where you pull up and instantly know what you would charge.

 

I feel that with an eyeball of the lot you can get a pretty good idea what to charge, compare it other yards your doing, figure in drive time, banks and other obstacles, add for back yard fences. Sq ft and decimals don't don't tell you the same thing as your eyeball will.

 

I use sq ft as the base for my bids but add in every factor possible by what I see. Thickness of grass, difficulty, obstacles, and the list goes on and then The biggest do I think that this potential customer will come out every single week and want to chew up my time talking. Because in the end I base my price off of time.
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I feel that with an eyeball of the lot you can get a pretty good idea what to charge, compare it other yards your doing, figure in drive time, banks and other obstacles, add for back yard fences. Sq ft and decimals don't don't tell you the same thing as your eyeball will.

Math doesn't lie.

You can often convince yourself of something else if all you do is look at something.

That's why it's important yo use both

Where do you get the first price from lawn A, in order to compare it to lawn B?
That's what other guys are charging for a lawn 'that size'?

what size? you didn't measure it? you just eyeballed it.

Don't act like 'eyeballing' something is the true professional way to estimate.
You would get fired from a company that pays professional estimators for that.

Eyeball is based on experience. But where do you get your price base from to begin with? It has to be based on measurements and production times.

You can't expect someone in their first year to just "eyeball lawns" have no job costing whatsoever, have no idea what or why to charge what they charge per hour and just run amok saying "yep looks like $40 to me"

 

I use sq ft as the base for my bids but add in every factor possible by what I see. Thickness of grass, difficulty, obstacles, and the list goes on and then The biggest do I think that this potential customer will come out every single week and want to chew up my time talking. Because in the end I base my price off of time.
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I liked ZTRs for that? What? WHAT? (continue mowing) I can't hear you? I'm sorry what? (continue mowing) This over here? (mow that spot)

they usually walk back in the house.:laugh:

Gaaaawd I hate chatty people.

ESPECIALLY when they are not the property owner…. where is the sign saying please make me stop my mower to ask me for directions??

 

I know my business and how it works. I have been seeing everybody saying about per square foot. I charge by acreage for residential and then i have something else for commercial. I just want to see what you guys have to say about square footage.

 

Been pondering this for my own marketing. Zero in on tiny lawns with pita akward access to the back yard...often very minimal offset from the next house....risk of hitting the heat pump unit....these traffic areas are often covered in bark or pea gravel and my Toro TimeMaster barely fits....or go for easier lawn with actual grass and easy access to the back yard that can be mowed with my Quick Dually 44 in less time for more money than struggling with my TimeMaster and being stuck hauling off clippings....?
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Tpend trust me I try that all the time. I do allow 30 minutes a day for talking to customers. Most of the time when mine do come out its because they want me to do something else for them so I do stop and talk.
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Tpend trust me I try that all the time. I do allow 30 minutes a day for talking to customers. Most of the time when mine do come out its because they want me to do something else for them so I do stop and talk.
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The chatty client factor is a serious issue. Older folks often think you have all the time in the world. They mean well and I enjoy the conversations as well but sometimes it's like tik tok already...I need to go already.

Facts are some older folks are fairly isolated and other than errands, store or medical appointments... they have limited social interaction.

With the super chatty ones it is a real reward to show up when nobody is home.
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Tpend trust me I try that all the time. I do allow 30 minutes a day for talking to customers. Most of the time when mine do come out its because they want me to do something else for them so I do stop and talk.
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it's all relative….

Usually I try to intercept and talk to clients.

Frak Ill talk to them allay long if they don't stop my crews.
, t shirts, sandals, standing in the sun yak yaking? (all the while the crews are making money?) Yes Please!

most of the time I find people are trying to waste your time and mess with you.
not the direct customer.
It's always the crazy aunt that lives in the attic, the neighbor who lost their dog or some dweeble asking for directions.

IF your decision maker waddles out into the lawn after your lawn mower…there is usually a good reason for it, and typically they don't take much if your time.

True story:
There I was…. the fish was THIS big..
No seriously,
We were mowing municipal work.
The wednesday list was all those crazy traffic islands. they had no actual addresses… it was like "bronson road traffic island"
so they were hard to pin point…. we usually just mowed everything that was tall!:laugh:

So one of these "traffic islands" was actually a peninsula of turf attached to church.
the grass was knee high, lush grass and just pure grassy goodness.

We get to cutting it with two ZTRs (one set high the other set lower, mowing in circles, spray cutting into pile, tarp off, then recut)
This lady runs out waving and screaming (I dunno where she came from)
Stops my guy… (his name….and this is the truth, is Charlie Brown…I hired him, with no experience, BECAUSE his name was charlie brown… I had to have him!)
so he shuts down the mower enough to hear her and she says…..

"I'm Having a WEDDING!"
so
chuck says "congratulations!"
she shouts back "What are you doing??!"
He rolls his eyes and shouts back

"MOW!!!!" and rev back up and engages blades.

Frikken hillarious.
the lady literally wanted us to stop mowing because it was her wedding day :hammerhead:

A few weeks later, after thinking about the muni workers shirts that were safety yellow and said "mow crew" on the back.

I got chuck a set of shirts that were safety yellow with a black zig zag on the chest and said "MOW" on the back,
Here's your new uniform chuck, you earned it!