Why you still miss local bids when you pay for a bid service

If you bid public work, this has probably happened to you. A competitor wins a job in a town you work in every week, and you never saw the bid. You check your bid service and it isn't there. You check the town's website, and there it is, posted three weeks ago, with a legal notice in the local paper.

It keeps happening because of how local bids get posted and how bid services collect them.

There is no central list

Federal agencies post on SAM.gov. States run their own procurement sites. Below that, the Census Bureau counts more than 90,000 local governments: counties, cities, towns, townships, school districts, and special districts for water, fire, parks, transit, housing and more (Census Bureau). That's a count of governments. Capveon counts agencies, which also takes in state and federal agencies and public bodies the Census doesn't treat as separate governments, like school systems run by a city or county. That's why our US count is higher, at more than 175,000. Each of them decides where to advertise its own bids.

Larger agencies tend to use an e-bidding portal. Many smaller ones post a PDF on their own website and run the notice in the newspaper, which is often all that state law requires. Texas, for example, requires a city to publish the notice in a local paper or, where there is none, post it at city hall (Tex. Local Gov't Code 252.041). Nothing requires the city to send it anywhere else.

How bid services fill their lists

A bid service only lists what it can collect. Some bids are sent to it by agencies. Some are copied from portals. Some are gathered by people or software checking agency websites, and there are far more agency websites than any team can check every day. The small agencies with their own web pages are the ones most often skipped, because each one posts only a few bids a year.

Those small agencies are often the best jobs for a local contractor. A water district replacing a fence or a township repaving a parking lot doesn't draw many bidders, only the few companies that saw the notice.

Addenda go missing too

Even when a service lists the bid, the addenda can lag behind. Agencies often post question answers and changes only on their own page or only in the portal where bidders registered. An addendum that moves the due date, adds a mandatory site visit or changes quantities can turn a winning bid into a rejected one if you never saw it.

Keywords miss the rest

Most services match bids to you by keyword or category code. Agencies describe the same work in different words. "Roof replacement", "building envelope improvements" and "Phase 2 facility repairs" can be the same job. A mowing contract might be called "right-of-way vegetation management". If your keywords don't match the title, the bid never reaches you.

Check your own coverage in an afternoon

You can measure how much your service misses.

1. List 25 to 30 agencies you want work from. Mix in a few big ones and a lot of small ones: towns, school districts, utilities, the housing authority.

2. Visit each agency's own bid page and write down every bid it posted in the last 60 days that fits your work.

3. Search your bid service for the same bids. Search by agency name, not your keywords.

4. Count. How many did the service have? How many arrived on the day they posted, and how many a week later? Did it have the addenda?

Expect the gaps to show up at the small agencies. Their size tells you how much work you aren't seeing.

What to do about the gap

Check the small agencies yourself. Bookmark the bid pages of the agencies your service misses and check them weekly.

Register as a vendor with each agency. Many email registered vendors when a bid in their category posts, for free.

Search by agency as well as by keyword. Read the scope of anything from an agency you care about, whatever the title says.

Read every addendum on the agency's own page before you submit.

Where Capveon fits

You can check 30 websites a week. You can't check every agency in a three-county area every day. Capveon checks every federal, state and local agency in your area each day, including the small ones that only post on their own website, reads each bid to decide whether it fits the work you described, and tells you when an addendum changes a bid you're watching.

If you already pay for a bid service, run Capveon next to it for the trial week and compare the two lists. Enter your website to get this week's list for your area, or see how Capveon compares with ConstructConnect and Dodge.