Some of you may wonder how we come up with our painting prices for HDB flats, condominiums and landed properties. So how do we charge for our painting costs particularly in Singapore?
What makes up the painting charges? How do we come up with painting quotes for you?
Labour cost
Simply put, labor cost is the cost of labor supplied to you in our service. In a job like painting, what customers gained in return the most is our service in painting efforts rendered to you in the form of hard manual work within a shorter amount of time in exchange for a refreshing environment for you and your family in the next few years down the road. Like most service providers who bill you service charges, we need to charge a component known as labor cost.
When we assess your HDB flat, condominium, house, or any site, we estimate the number of days and the number of workers we need to supply to complete the job accordingly to our usual practices. The labor cost is usually calculated base on the number of days each worker we need to deploy for the paint job, typically at 8 to 10 hours a day for the job. Like any other business, we have to strategize the best way to optimize the pool of workers we have to complete a job in the shortest time possible; whenever one more or one lesser worker is involved at whichever stage of the painting assignment, there is always a variable labour cost tagged to it.
Multi storey landed properties or maisonettes that have layouts that require our paint workers to work with multiple mezzanines within the house will naturally need more effort in terms of not just painting but facilitating themselves in the course of painting such as moving their painting tools and ladders up and down. More floor levels means more protection works to be done as well.
Transport Cost
With the exception of our preliminary trip arranged to view your site to work out a quotation for you which is free of charge and non-obligatory, the day-to-day expenses of transporting the workers to and from the painting sites have to be factored in as well. This also explains why the bigger the apartment or house, the longer the painting job, and the more the cost of the painting service.
Painting Supplies and Inventory
Like every other business, we have expenditures relating to the inventory and supplies we acquire that makes our painting services to our customers possible. The capital costs invested in any business always have impacts on the pricings of the products of services every businesses charge to their consumers.
The cans of paint that we ordered from our suppliers depend very much on the size of your place. The more extensive your walls and ceilings, and the more doors, gates, fences, etc, you have, the more paint supplies we will need to order to cover the entire house. This also largely explains the increase in painting prices according to the area or size of the property for the job.
Other Running and Operative costs
Painting workers’ Salaries and Overheads
When painting companies employ painters, the painters are paid salaries on a monthly basis. Although many painters are foreigners and painting is considered blue collar jobs, like most employers, apart from paying these workers their monthly wages, there are many other overhead costs of employing painting workers such as levies, insurance, lodging, etc. Most of these workers come with prerequisites of what is required of them to carry out strenuous painting jobs; they have had relevant experience working as painters or similar jobs back in other companies. A lot of such workers in the painting industries are often perceived as lowly paid contracting workmen, however this is not true. As the job requires manual labour that needs a high degree of physical power and energy, it cannot be deemed as light or simple duties, hence the salaries commanded are not necessarily low.
Factors relating to the Labor Market
Shortage of Local employees and tightening measures on foreign hires
It is not new that there are not many Singaporeans who are willing to work in the manual industries like painting. With the recent tightening measures over foreign workers employment, the Government has come up with a quota on the number of foreign hires. Like most manual sectors, we are faced with employees deficiency as more foreign work passes applications as well as renewals of work permits are being rejected. It is not just a matter of not being able to get new hires, but even some of our current workforce is at stake. All of these eventually results in high demand of monthly pays and welfare from the workers that is translated to higher operative expenses to us.
Considering all of the above, we factor in a conservation percentage of profit, as with all other businesses.
All in all, we are confident that we remain one of the most reasonable and affordable painting companies in terms of painting costs will only render the most value for money service to our customers.