FM contract pricing built on evidence, not guidelines

Why facilities contracts are mispriced so often

Most FM contracts are built on assumptions and generic industry guidelines rather than on evidence from the site itself. A rate card gets applied to a floor area, an allowance gets added for the things nobody measured, and the result is a price that describes an average building rather than this one.

Conventional pricing methods carry up to 25% inaccuracy. On a multi-year contract that is the difference between a healthy margin and a loss — and it cuts both ways, because the same guesswork prices some contracts out of contention entirely.

What ML10 prices from instead

• Site recordings captured on an iPhone Pro with LiDAR.
• Drone surveys where the site or the roof cannot practically be walked.
• Live asset data from the register, rather than a headcount and a floor plan.
• The same underlying capture that produces the asset inventory, so the pricing and the register never contradict each other.

From months to minutes

Pricing a large FM contract conventionally is a quarter of work: surveys, spreadsheets, review cycles and a final number nobody can fully trace. ML10 compresses that to an afternoon, and the output arrives with the evidence attached.

That 85% time saving is measured across 40 completed beta trials against current FM services guideline pricing methods, in which manual preparation took three to ten times longer. The point is not only speed — it is that a decision made in minutes can be revisited when the site changes, and a decision that took months usually cannot.

What you can hand to a bid team or a client

The output is audit-ready: specifications, defensible pricing and a maintenance plan, each traceable back to the captured asset data. When a client asks why a line costs what it costs, there is an answer that does not begin with the word 'typically'.