We write this article knowing it will be read by clients consulting several firms, ourselves among them. That is deliberate. The criteria below do not particularly favour us: they are those of a standard, and a serious firm meets them without difficulty. A firm that bristles at them has already told you something.
The decennial insurance certificate, current and actually read
It is the first document to ask for, and the least often read. A certificate is not a policy: it attests to a contract on a given date. Three things are checked on it. Its period of validity — a certificate expires every year. The declared activities — they must cover the works you are entrusting, and a firm covered for finishing trades is not necessarily covered for structure. And the geographical area covered, which is no detail when a project lies outside France.
A named contact, and how often they are on site
Ask who will decide on site, by name, and how often that person will physically be there. The answer says more than any brochure. On a renovation, almost every arbitration arises from a discovery: someone must be able to settle it within the hour, knowing the project. If the commercial contact and the site manager are two different people, ask which one you will be calling.
A schedule with hold points, not a completion date
A calendar carrying only a handover date commits to nothing. What commits are the intermediate milestones, the points where one phase governs the next, and the dates by which you, the client, must have decided. A firm that dates your decisions as it dates its own tasks is telling you it has already seen what makes a site drift.
What can be checked before signing costs a week. What is discovered afterwards costs a project.
A written site protocol
In an occupied residence or an inhabited building, the protocol is worth as much as the quotation. It states how common areas are protected, what the hours are, how rubble leaves, and what happens if something is damaged. This is not a courtesy: in Monaco, two ministerial orders published in the Journal de Monaco in December 2018 govern site noise and site hours. Elsewhere, the building regulations and the managing agent raise the same questions. A firm that has not anticipated them will discover them at your expense.
What a serious quotation contains — and what it excludes
A complete quotation states its assumptions. It says what it presumes about the state of the fabric, what could not be probed, and what will be revisited if stripping out reveals something else. It also lists what is not included. A quotation without exclusions is not a reassuring quotation: it is an incomplete one, and the gap will appear later, at the worst moment.
Finally, be wary of one thing far more than of a high price: a figure given before any survey. On an old building, an amount announced without probing is not a competitive offer, it is a hypothesis that will have to be corrected one day — and on that day, you will already have signed.
