A land clearing price over the phone is a guess because the things that set the price cannot be seen from a phone call: stem size and density, how many stumps are in the ground, how wet the soil is, how the equipment gets in, and what happens to the debris. Two Southeast Texas acres that sound the same can be very different jobs. A firm number given without walking the tract tends to turn into a change order once the machine finds what the phone call missed.
Everybody wants a number before they commit to anything, and that is reasonable. The trouble with land clearing is that the number depends on things nobody can see from a description. This is what moves the price and why a walk of the property is the honest way to get one.
Acres Do Not Set the Price
Acreage is the easiest thing to describe and the least useful for pricing. An acre of young regrowth and an acre of mature hardwood with old logging stumps can take wildly different amounts of machine time. Density and stem size do most of the work in a price, and both have to be seen.
What a Phone Call Cannot Tell You
A phone call will not tell anyone how many stumps are buried in the brush, whether the ground is soft enough to rut, whether a trailer can get to the gate, whether there is a fence, well, septic tank or pipeline marker hidden in the thicket, or how much debris has to be mulched, burned or hauled. Every one of those changes the job.
Where Change Orders Come From
A change order usually is not a contractor being dishonest. It is a price that was set before anybody looked, meeting the ground as it actually is. The stumps were there the whole time. The cheapest way to avoid the surprise is to find them before the price is set, not after the machine is on the property.
What a Site Walk Gives You
A walk of the tract turns a guess into a scope. You come away knowing what will be cleared, how, what happens to the debris, where the water goes when it is done, what is excluded, and what the ground looks like on the last day. That is also what makes three quotes comparable, because they are finally quoting the same job.
Get More Than One, the Same Way
Get more than one quote if you want, and ask every contractor the same questions. Our checklist for that is in Before You Clear: A Southeast Texas Landowner's Checklist on this site.
