Construction and Trade Contractors

A contractor with four vans and four crews has no slack. Losing one van is losing a quarter of the week's capacity, and the cost is not the repair, it is the jobs that get rescheduled and the customer who calls somebody else. That makes the return date the specification and the hourly rate close to irrelevant.

It also makes deferral rational in a way it is not for a private owner. A dented rear quarter that does not affect the doors, the load floor or the seal can wait until January. A rear door that no longer closes against its frame cannot, because tools get wet and stolen. Sorting damage into those two categories on the first call is the most useful thing a shop can do for a contractor.

Small operators are also personally exposed in a way a fleet is not. A sole proprietor or a three van shop is paying the deductible out of the same account that pays wages, and the timing of that matters. Deposits are posted rather than negotiated: 50 percent at authorisation on work over $2,000, a further 25 percent when parts arrive on work over $10,000, and the balance at pickup.

A contractor van is not an empty van. Shelving down both sides, a bulkhead, drawer units, a pipe or ladder rack on the roof, a bottle rack, an inverter and a work light circuit. Body work behind any of that means the upfit comes out, and reinstalling it is a real operation rather than an afterthought.

So it gets quoted as its own line rather than absorbed into body labour, because a carrier that is not shown the removal and refit will not pay for it and a contractor who is not shown it thinks the shop has padded the estimate. Cargo shelving and racking install runs $750 to $7,500 and bulkhead and partition install runs $400 to $2,500, which is the scale of what removal and reinstallation is actually worth.

Roof racks are the recurring structural problem rather than a fitting problem. A ladder or pipe rack loaded past what its mounts were drawn for pulls fasteners through a roof panel, and the first symptom is water inside the van rather than a visible failure. Roof rack and ladder install runs $400 to $3,500, and a rack refitted onto a roof that was already deformed is a rack that will do it again.

Tools are the practical problem nobody mentions. Bring the van empty where you can. Where you cannot, tell us on the first call so somewhere secure is allocated, because a van in a paint booth cannot hold anything.

Rarely the front. Contractor van damage concentrates at the rear and the corners, because the van spends its life reversing into places it barely fits. Rear barn doors and their hinges, which take the load of a loaded door swung in wind. The rear corners and the step. A sliding door track worn out by fifty cycles a day. A quarter panel dragged along a skip, a bollard or a stack of materials.

Sliding door repair runs $400 to $3,500 and rear barn door service and latch repair runs $300 to $2,500. Those two are the most common single repairs on this class and both are worth doing before the door stops sealing rather than after, because a door out of true takes the frame with it eventually.

The other pattern is a partial load strike: a van hit while parked on a site by a delivery vehicle, a piece of plant, or a load being swung. Those are third party claims, which means somebody else's carrier is paying and has no relationship with you at all. Photographs at intake with scale in frame are what stop that scope being disputed by an adjuster who never saw the van.

Book it, do not bring it. A van that arrives unannounced waits alongside everything else, and the scheduling conversation is where the achievable time saving lives. On a known scope, and contractor damage usually is a known scope, parts can be on hand before the van arrives and the repair compresses to the work itself.

Where a scope is not known, teardown decides it and no date is honest before that. What can be promised is the sequence: structure first because everything else sits on it, then body, then refinish, then the upfit back in and a function check. Refinish is real shop time and rushing it produces paint that fails within two seasons on a vehicle that lives outdoors.

Van collision repair and refinish runs $1,500 to $40,000 or more, and cab body repair runs $750 to $12,000 for the door, hood, fender and bumper work that makes up most of this category. Fleet graphics and vinyl wrap runs $1,500 to $8,500, and on a signwritten van the graphics get scheduled into the repair rather than added after, because a mismatched panel is an advertisement seen by every customer.