Bid Advisor

Built by ISERV with Claude Code and Claude Cowork for Hope and Help Center of Central Florida.

Claude Code + Claude Cowork

The situation

Hope and Help Center of Central Florida is an Orlando nonprofit that has provided HIV testing, care, and support services since 1988. In 2026 it set out to convert a building at 7750 S. Orange Blossom Trail into a combined HIV and primary care hub, the largest capital undertaking in the organization’s history, funded by a capital campaign rather than operating surplus.

Five general contractors were invited. One withdrew. Four bids were opened on August 21, 2026, ranging from $4,221,830 to $5,500,962, a spread of nearly thirty percent on what was supposed to be the same building. The decision sat with the Building and Properties Committee, a volunteer body of directors and staff. None of them do this for a living. The organization had engaged an owner’s representative and an architect of record, but the fiduciary decision, and the duty to be able to defend it, belonged to the board.

This is the ordinary condition of nonprofit capital procurement. The dollar amounts are large enough to be existential for the organization and small enough that nobody has a procurement department. The documents are voluminous, technical, and inconsistent. The people responsible are volunteers with day jobs. And the failure mode is not fraud, it is awarding to the lowest number, then discovering over the following year that the low number excluded work the others carried, and paying for that work again as change orders negotiated with a contractor who no longer faces competition.

What Bid Advisor is

Bid Advisor is a single self contained application: one file, no server, no database, no login, nothing to install. It opens in a browser, runs entirely on the machine it is opened on, and saves its state to a text block the user can copy into an email or a board file. That architecture was a deliberate constraint, not a limitation. The users are volunteer directors on personal laptops, and anything requiring IT support, a subscription, or an account would not have been adopted.

Inside it are nine working surfaces, from bid leveling and division level detail through a weighted scorecard, a board dashboard, due diligence, bidder questions, market and regulatory items, and document gaps. One control anonymizes the whole field, renaming every bidder A through E across every table and chart, so the committee can form its view before it knows whose number is whose.

What it found

The four bids were not four prices for the same building

Each firm drew the line between its own scope and the owner’s in a different place. One included its performance bond, a permit allowance, and a builder’s risk allowance inside its number. Another included none of them. Restating all four on one declared basis moved one bidder’s number by $98,586 and another’s by $40,016.

On its own that is a data point. What makes it a finding is the corroboration around it. One bidder states affirmatively that its figure includes acoustic glass and soundproofing added by a mid bid addendum. Another carries only a $30,000 allowance and records that the acoustic door specification is missing from the documents entirely. The low bidder’s own drawing log, the document that would say what it actually priced, was listed as an enclosure in its cover letter and was not in the submission. Set alongside the low bidder’s other exclusions, the identified scope shortfall runs to somewhere between $180,000 and $250,000, which would put the low bid within a few percent of the second bid rather than nine percent below it.

The lowest bid was low because it was incomplete

Glazing and storefront is a single scope package. Three bidders priced it between $191,700 and $241,700. The fourth priced it at $118,635.

A large part of the price difference is a difference about time

General conditions, supervision, temporary facilities, project management, are charged for as long as the job runs. The four monthly rates are closely comparable. The durations are not.

Bidder A’s four month schedule is less than half the field’s median for a 22,518 square foot clinic conversion with new storefront, full mechanical and electrical replacement, and a generator. If four months proves optimistic, its general conditions are understated by roughly $125,000 to $300,000. Bidder C priced $388,100 of general conditions and submitted no schedule at all.

The finding that outranked all of the prices

An addendum issued a week before the bid deadline referred to revised drawings and specifications that were never issued to bidders. Two of the four contractors say so independently and in writing. Every bid in front of the committee was therefore priced against documents the design team had already said would change, and whatever those documents eventually contain becomes a change order against whoever wins.

How it was built

The work was done by an ISERV team member who also serves as a volunteer Vice Chairman of the Hope and Help board, a technologist, not a construction professional. He had no prior experience leveling a bid, no template, and no budget for a consultant. What he had was the Claude platform ISERV already runs on every day, and roughly nineteen days between the first working session and a board ready analysis of four bids.

Governance was designed in, not bolted on

What this means for Hope and Help

• It is buying the same building from every bidder. Four prices that described four different scopes have been restated on one basis.
• The largest scope gap was found before award, not after. A six figure shortfall in the lowest bid was identified and put to that bidder in writing while the field was still competitive.
• It did not award on documents already known to be changing. Moving the award date was an uncomfortable outcome, and the right one.
• Money was found that nobody had asked for. $454,531 of contractor offered reductions catalogued in one place, and a $69,725 sales tax position available to the organization, provided it is structured before signature.
• The board can defend the decision. Weights ratified before prices were known, the same questions to every bidder on the same day, and every figure traceable to a source document.

Status