Hoisting and rigging
Hoisting and rigging is the lifting and placement of materials and equipment on site — cranes, hoists, forklifts — and the question of who provides and pays for it.
Also written as hoisting, rigging, crane time.
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Reviewed by Eric Collin · President and Founder of Firmo Construction, 20+ years in preconstruction and bid evaluation
Almost every trade needs something lifted, and almost none of them want to own the crane. Whether hoisting is provided by the general contractor as general conditions or by each trade for its own material is a decision that has to be made explicitly, because both arrangements are common.
When it is left implicit, it produces a textbook scope gap. The steel bidder assumes it has the crane, the mechanical bidder assumes the general contractor provides hoisting for rooftop units, the roofing bidder assumes the same, and nobody has priced the second lift.
The cost is not trivial. A mobile crane brought in for a day carries mobilization, operator, rigger, permits, and often street closure. A bidder assuming it can share someone else's crane has priced on an assumption about another contractor's schedule that nobody has agreed to.
The practical fix is to state the hoisting arrangement in the invitation to bid and to require each bidder to confirm what it has carried. This is one of the highest-yield questions in the whole comparison, because the answer is nearly always inconsistent across a field.
- General conditions
General conditions are the project-specific costs of running a job that belong to no trade — supervision, the site office, temporary utilities, cleanup, and similar.
- Scope gap
A scope gap is work required by the project that no bidder included in its price, because every bidder assumed someone else was carrying it.
- Temporary facilities
Temporary facilities are the services and structures a site needs while it is being built — power, lighting, water, heat, sanitation, fencing, and the site office.
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