How to read a contractor's list of completed projects

When a board or an owner is choosing a contractor, the completed-project list is usually the strongest evidence available. It is also the document people skim. A photo gallery is pleasant to look at and tells you almost nothing, because a good photograph of a building says more about the photographer than the builder. What makes a list useful is whether it can be checked.

Names and towns, or it is not evidence

The first test is simple. Does each entry name the actual building and the town it is in? A list that says Bank of Hydro in Weatherford, or Western Plains Library System in Clinton, is making a claim you can verify by driving there or by ringing the organization. A list of unlabelled photographs is not making a checkable claim at all. If a contractor will not attach names, ask why.

The second test is whether the buildings are near you. A contractor who has built twenty things two hundred miles away has a real record, but not necessarily one that tells you how they handle your climate, your subcontractor pool or your inspection process. Local work is more informative than distant work of the same type.

Look for range and for repetition

Both are good signals and they mean different things. Repetition inside a building type says the firm has done this specific thing enough to have solved its recurring problems. Several banks, or several churches, means the second one benefited from the first. Range across types says the firm can handle a building it has not built before, which matters if yours is unusual.

• Is there more than one project of the type you are building
• Is there a spread of building types, or only one repeated shape
• Are any of the projects additions or phased work onto occupied buildings
• Do the towns cluster near you, or are they scattered
• Is there anything recent, or does the list stop some years ago

Ask what they actually did

This is the question most owners skip. Being listed on a project can mean the firm designed and built it, or built it from someone else's drawings, or was one of several contractors on it. All three are legitimate and they are not the same claim. On a design/build project the firm is answering for the drawings too, which is a materially stronger statement about the finished building.

It is also worth asking who from the firm ran each job, and whether that person is still there. A twenty-year record is only relevant to your project if the people who built that record are the people who will build yours. A firm that can tell you which construction manager ran which job is telling you the record is real and current.

Then go and look

Nothing on paper substitutes for standing in front of a finished building, ideally one that has been up for a while. New construction almost always looks good. A building that is ten or fifteen years old is where you find out whether the details were done properly. Look at the joints, the base of the walls, the places where two materials meet, and how the roof edges have held up.

If it is a building the public can enter, go inside. If it is a church or a library, ring the office and ask whether someone would be willing to say how the project went. Organizations that had a good experience are usually happy to say so, and the ones that did not will tell you something more valuable.

Longevity is a claim too

A firm that has been operating in one area for decades has a particular kind of exposure. It cannot move away from a bad building. The people who commissioned it live in the same towns, attend the same churches, bank at the same branches. That is not proof of quality on its own, but it is a real constraint, and it is worth weighing.

Sawatzky Construction has been building out of Weatherford since 1954 and publishes seventeen named projects across Weatherford, Elk City, Clinton, Woodward, Hinton, Cheyenne, Pauls Valley, Thomas, Del City and Oklahoma City. The list is on this site with the towns attached, which is the point of publishing it. Go and look at a few.