Describe the job you are about to price. The desk finds the closed jobs closest to it and shows what they actually came in at — cost per square foot, calendar duration, fee and general conditions — as a median with the middle half of the range around it. Put your own number in and it will tell you where that number sits against the ones we have built.
Ask in plain words — what is the biggest healthcare job we have built?, average square footage of our last five schools, median $/SF on negotiated work in Huntsville. Claude reads only your question and the names of the fields; every number is then worked out from the desk's own records, and the jobs behind it are listed underneath so you can check the answer rather than take it on trust.
Everything on file, filterable. Whole-job metrics only for now — cost by division comes from the buyout workbooks and is a separate pass. Rows tagged Procore came from Procore live; the rest from the Unanet BH project data sheet, cross-checked against Unanet CRM.
Square footage and real dates are the thinnest part of this data, and they are what a schedule gets priced from. Anything entered here overrides the imported record for that job and is what the comparables use from then on.
Entered or corrected here
The work list. A job with no square footage cannot price a bid by area, and one with no dates cannot price a duration — these are the gaps, newest first, because a recent job prices a new bid better than an old one.
How to read the numbers
Median and the middle half
Every figure is a median with the 25th to 75th percentile around it — the middle half of comparable jobs. Medians, not averages, because one outlier job would otherwise drag the number somewhere unhelpful.
Every tile prints its own n. Four jobs is a hint. Twelve is a range you can defend in a bid review. One is an anecdote, and the desk says so.
Our own self-perform work
Jobs with SP in the number or “Self-Perform” in the name are Bailey-Harris doing its own work on another job — concrete on McKee Road, demo at Central Sterilization. They are booked as separate jobs but they are a trade package, not a building.
Which matters because they inherit the parent building's square footage while carrying only their own contract, so their $/SF reads $13 to $60 and would drag any median down. The desk gives them no $/SF at all and leaves them out of comparables unless you ask for them.
Their value rolls up onto the parent job instead, in the BH self-perform column — so Straehle Hess shows $734,383 self-performed of a $2,549,455 job, 28.8% of it. Owner reads Bailey-Harris and office Auburn on all of them.
Bid data is not in here
The BH project data sheet also carried 240 PC rows — precon pursuits, at $2.22bn bid between 2010 and 2024. They have been taken out of this desk entirely.
They were never priceable: a PC number is what we bid, not what a job cost, and none was built under that number because a won pursuit gets renumbered. 161 are Lost or Canceled outright, none carries a schedule and only 7 carry square footage. Nor can they answer the question you would want them to — the source has no “Won” status, so the 79 rows marked Budget or Pending hold the wins mixed in with the abandoned, and a win rate cannot be worked out until someone reconciles them by hand.
All 240 were exported to a workbook first, with their amounts, sectors, statuses and 56 possible live-job matches, so nothing was thrown away. The one comparison worth having is still worth having: GL Pack was bid at $29,786,724 and the job carries $29,673,647, 0.4% apart — which is also what settles 25AU002's $112,040 “original” contract as never having been loaded.
The five dates, and where each one lives
A projected finish and an actual finish are not the same number, so the desk keeps them apart. On Procore's project Admin page: Start Date is the contractual start, Actual Start Date the real one, Completion Date the contractual finish and Projected Finish Date where the schedule stands today.
Actual completion has no project-level field in Procore at all. It lives on the prime contract, and it is filled in on only 8 of our jobs — which is right, because only 8 of them have actually finished.
Watch one trap. Procore pre-fills Actual Start Date from Start Date, so a job that has not broken ground still shows an actual start — 2511-01 reads 10/15/2026 in both, a month from now. The desk refuses any actual date that is in the future, or that sits on a job still in bidding or preconstruction, so those read blank here rather than wrong.
Schedule duration is measured actual to actual where both exist, and tagged est — estimated — when it had to fall back to a projected finish. 137 jobs are measured on actual dates; 39 are estimates.
How the Ask tab works
Claude reads your question and the names of the fields plus the list of values actually present in the data — the sectors, delivery methods, offices and owners on file. It hands back a query, nothing more. Every figure is then computed here, from the same records the rest of the desk uses.
Which is why the jobs behind each answer are listed underneath it. If the number looks wrong, the rows will show you why — usually a job that should not have been in the set, or a field that is blank on half of them. The answer always says how many of the matching jobs actually carried the figure it averaged.
Self-perform packages are left out unless the question asks for them. It will say plainly when a question is not answerable from these fields; subcontractor ratings live in the Prequal & Sub Rating Desk, not here.
What the desk will not tell you
It has no cost detail below the whole job. “Concrete ran over on our last four schools” needs the buyout workbooks, which are a separate pass.
It cannot see scope. Two 40,000 SF healthcare jobs can be a shell and a full fit-out. Read the comparables, do not just take the median.
And it is only as good as what is in Procore. A few prime contracts were loaded almost entirely through change orders — 25AU002 shows a $112,040 original against a $29.7M revised — which reads as a 26,000% overrun but is really a data-entry pattern. Those carry a check tag rather than being trusted.
The escalation index
Cost per square foot is escalated year by year, not by a single flat rate — because construction inflation has been anything but flat. 2022 alone ran +19.9% while 2024 was +0.1%. Where the index publishes a building-type figure the desk uses it, so a school escalates on the school index and a hospital on the health care one. Change any figure here and the comparables update; it is stored with the page for everyone.