Since the beginning of 2022, a lot happened in the construction industry. We saw the most considerable inflation of material prices in over half a century. Pair that with material shortages and construction companies have been left with no choice but to cough up exorbitant amounts of money, often not budgeted, to complete projects.
With 2022 behind us, our long-standing partner, Laxton’s, has released their latest SMM and NRM price books for materials in the Construction Industry for 2023.
In this article, let’s dive deep into why construction estimating software alongside up-to-date pricing libraries can help increase and protect your profit margins in the new year.
Laxton’s Building Price Books
Laxton’s is nationally recognised for releasing the UK’s most accurate and up-to-date Building Price Books over the last 24 years. Laxton’s and Eque2 have been working alongside each other to deliver their pricing libraries to Eque2 EValuate Estimating software customers.
By having such powerful data available to them, companies who have been submitting tenders for projects have been able to create accurate estimates even in such a volatile market. This has helped them take into consideration any unforeseen costs and ensure they never go over budget, helping them to remain profitable.
To do this, Laxton’s pricing libraries help in numerous ways, including:
- The ability to search through items using keywords and drill-downs to create tenders accurately and quickly, allowing you to submit tenders for work before competitors.
- Use both NRM and SMM pricing libraries (discover the differences)
- Have annual updates to your project costs, ensuring your estimates and tenders are accurate at all times.
- Quickly and accurately price jobs using Laxton’s build up’s and default resource rates, or use library rates to compare with subcontractors’ quotations.
With both libraries and resource rates updated every year, we are pleased to announce that the latest release of Laxton’s Price Book 2023 is now available in both NRM and SMM rules of measurement.
The all-new 2023 edition is available in hard copy book form as well as a fully bookmarked PDF on a CD and is also available exclusively within Eque2’s EValuate Estimating Software.
Using Laxton’s within modern estimating software can help you to provide resource build-ups for pricing items directly, or for comparison with your rates or subcontractor rates – making it even easier to quickly and accurately price jobs.
To find out more about how EValuate Estimating Software with Laxton’s Priced Libraries can benefit your business please click here.
You can also purchase your hard copy or PDF version of Laxton’s Building Price Book 2023 by visiting Laxton’s website
Eque2 EValuate Estimating Software
According to Laxton’s, we’ve seen an average material price increase of more than 20% since August 2020. In some cases such as steel, prices have risen by up to 60%.
Whilst we don’t know and can endlessly speculate over how material prices will change again over the next 12 months, there is one thing for certain: companies are still adopting construction estimating software to save time, protect budgets and improve tendering.
Eque2’s EValuate Estimating Software is the UK’s market-leading estimating solution in the construction industry.
EValuate has been designed to:
- Increase accuracy in your estimating and reports so you can price jobs more effectively whilst monitoring costs, valuations and retentions in real-time when on the job, preventing you from going over budget and receiving payments on time.
- Improve efficiency in producing your bills of quantity and tenders giving you the edge over your competitors, displaying your reliability to the potential client, winning you more jobs
- Improve the organisation of documents that you send between contractors and clients meaning that nothing gets overlooked, encouraging better communication between internal and external teams.
Our construction-specific estimating solution is designed to help you produce tenders on time, as accurately and professionally as possible.
If you are a main contractor or a subcontractor, and would like to learn more about EValuate and how it can benefit your pre-contract processes, click here.