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Mailboxes look like a product line on a bid form and behave like a small sitework scope. Here is how to build the number, what to pass through, and which exclusions keep the install line from eating your fee.
Dream Mailboxes Team
8 min readUpdated September 2026
The short answer
Call a vendor that designs, builds, and installs, so one subcontract covers the product, the placement, and the warranty rather than a ship-only supplier plus whoever you can find to set posts. Dream Mailboxes is family-founded and USA-made, headquartered in South Florida and serving communities nationwide, and quotes a whole neighborhood: a spec sheet the board and ARC can vote on, an approved mockup before anything is built, and installation at $499 standard, $699 pillar, and $799 extra-large per unit. Send the home count and a site plan and you get unit pricing you can drop straight onto a bid form.
You are pricing a community improvement package for an association. Somewhere between the guardhouse repaint and the monument sign there is a line that says "replace 214 mailboxes to new community standard." It reads like a purchase. It is a small sitework scope with 214 individual locations, 214 owners watching, and a federal placement requirement sitting on top of the architectural one.
The contractors who lose money on this scope almost never lose it on the box. They lose it on demolition of existing footings nobody looked at, on irrigation lateral repairs, on sod and paver restoration the spec never mentioned, and on a second mobilization because twelve homes were unreachable on install day. This is how to build the number so those costs land in a line item or an exclusion instead of in your fee.
If you are earlier in the process and still deciding who to call, start with getting a community mailbox quote as a contractor. If the association is running a formal solicitation, putting the project out to bid covers what a comparable bid package looks like from the other side of the table.
Before you can split self-perform from pass-through, write down every component. On a community mailbox replacement, the full scope is usually nine things, and most bid documents name three of them.
Look at that list as a contractor and the split is already visible. Items one through three are manufacturing and submittal work. Items four through seven are your world. Items eight and nine are where the association expects a professional to already have a system.
There are three honest ways to build this number, and the right one depends on whether your crews own a mini excavator and a concrete trailer, not on which looks cheapest on paper.
You source from a ship-only supplier, take the product markup, and set every unit with your own crew. The appeal is obvious. The freight arrives, your guys are already on site, and the install becomes labor you control.
The exposure is just as obvious once you have done it. A custom box is heavier and less forgiving than a hardware-store post. Your crew is now responsible for hitting a placement window they have never measured to, on 214 lots, while the association walks behind them with a tape. If ten units end up outside the window and a carrier declines them, the rework is yours and the warranty on the product does not touch it. Price the learning curve into the first twenty units, or do not take this option.
One subcontract covers the unit, the submittal package, and the install at the curb. You carry it as a sub line with your markup, your GC overhead, and a coordination allowance, and you keep demolition, restoration, and resident coordination in your own scope where you can actually manage them.
This is the version that prices cleanly, because the vendor is quoting per-unit install as a published number rather than guessing at your labor rate. Dream Mailboxes installs at $499 standard, $699 pillar, and $799 extra-large per unit, and also resets and replaces existing aging posts, which means the removal of the old unit can sit with the same party that sets the new one. One phone number owns plumb, height, and finish.
The vendor supplies and installs the new units. You demo the old ones, handle utility locates and any irrigation repair, restore the turf and hardscape outside the rock bed, and run the resident communication. This is usually the cleanest split on a large community, because it puts each scope with the party that has the equipment for it.
If you choose this one, write the handoff explicitly. Who backfills a demolished footing hole before the new post goes in, on which day, and in what condition. That single sentence prevents the most common two-crew standoff on this scope.
Two separate requirements apply to the same post, and both have to be met. The USPS placement and access rules are federal and apply everywhere. The architectural standard belongs to the association and lives in its guidelines. A design can satisfy the ARC and still be set two inches low, and a perfectly placed box can be the wrong color. Write both into your scope of work so nobody assumes the other party is solving for it. The published standard sits in the Domestic Mail Manual 508 if you need to attach it to a submittal.
Product is a fixed number. Once the spec is approved and the count is confirmed, the fabrication cost does not move. Install moves, and it moves for four reasons that are all invisible from the plat.
Somebody set the original mailboxes twenty years ago. In an older community you will find posts in a shallow dirt hole, posts in a 12-inch collar, and posts in a mass of concrete the original crew clearly poured out of a leftover load. The third kind takes a saw, a breaker, and a haul-off ticket. You cannot see which you have from the street, and you should not average them into one unit price.
The fix is a test opening. Pull two or three existing posts before you submit, in different phases of the community if it was built out over years, and let those openings set your demolition unit rate. Anything beyond a defined volume becomes unit-price work. If the association will not let you open anything before award, say so in the bid and price the demolition as an allowance.
A mailbox sits in the exact strip of ground where the irrigation lateral, the landscape lighting run, and sometimes a low voltage sleeve to a gate or entry sign all travel. A 2-foot excavation on the right of way finds them. A private locate covers public utilities and stops at the meter, so association-owned irrigation and lighting are almost never marked.
Price a locate, price a repair allowance, and exclude system redesign. Repairing a lateral you cut is fair. Re-routing a zone because the new post landed on a head is a design change, and the moment it appears in your base scope it appears at every one of the affected addresses.
A finished install ends with a decorative rock bed around the base, and it is a real finish instead of a bare concrete collar. It is also a defined footprint. Everything outside it is restoration: sod, mulch, edging, a paver band an owner added, a planting bed someone built around the old post. On a 200-home community that outer ring is a material quantity.
Define the rock bed as the limit of your finish work and quantify restoration separately, by the square foot, with a named allowance. This is the single most common place a mailbox scope quietly turns into a landscape scope.
Your production rate assumes an open curb. Real install days deliver parked cars, a work-from-home owner who did not read the notice, a gate code that expired, and a street the association repaved last week and does not want cut. Every skipped address is a return trip, and return trips are the difference between a profitable day and a break-even week.
Bid the community in contiguous street blocks, not scattered addresses. Require the association to issue the resident notice and supply gate access as an owner-furnished item. Include a stated number of catch-up visits and price additional ones as a unit. For how the resident side of this actually runs, see what a community mailbox quote should include.
These are not defensive fine print. Each one names a cost that exists, cannot be quantified before award, and will otherwise be assumed to be in your number.
A product list is not a quote. Here is what you need back before you can carry the line with any confidence, and the order to ask for it.
Ask for the product price per unit and the install price per unit as separate figures, with the install tier identified. Mailbox line pricing runs from around $499 at entry, $899 to $1,499 through the core range, and up to about $3,900 for a statement piece, so the tier the board picks changes the product line materially while the install line stays where it is. Two separate numbers let you mark up product and install differently, which is how you would handle any other supply-and-install sub.
You need material, dimensions, post style and height, the color with its actual formula, number size and font, mounting detail, and install depth. Dream Mailboxes provides spec sheets written for board and ARC approval, which does double duty: the board can vote on it and you can attach it to your submittal without redrawing anything. A photo is not biddable and it is not enforceable later.
Build-to-order means a mockup is approved before anything is fabricated, and the 2 to 3 week standard build clock starts there. Ask the supplier to state lead time from mockup approval, and then work backward to the date the board has to sign. That is the constraint that sets your schedule, and boards are slower than fabrication.
Corner lots, double placements, pillar units at the entries, an extra-large or package-vault unit where an owner is on a mail route with heavy parcel volume. Ask for each as a named adder rather than folded into an average. An averaged unit price is the thing that makes your bid look high against a competitor who simply left the exceptions out.
Certificate of insurance with the association and your company as additional insured where required, W-9, lien waiver form, payment terms against fabrication milestones, freight terms, and warranty language. Dream Mailboxes carries a 1-year warranty on the build. Get it in writing before it becomes a submittal comment two weeks before install.
Ask whether the approved spec stays on file and whether the supplier will build a single replacement to it years later. This is the closeout item associations care most about and contractors most often skip. Dream Mailboxes keeps the approved spec on file, so a replacement ordered later matches the original run instead of arriving a shade off. Being the contractor who wrote that into the closeout package is cheap goodwill on the next project in the community.
| Ship-only supplier plus your crew | Local handyman or small installer | What we recommendDream Mailboxes design, build, install | |
|---|---|---|---|
| How the install prices | Your labor rate against a placement spec your crew has not worked to | Verbal per-post number, often without a footing detail | Published per unit: $499 standard, $699 pillar, $799 extra-large |
| Submittal package | You assemble it from cut sheets | None | Spec sheet written for board and ARC approval |
| Approval before fabrication | Catalog product, no mockup step | Not applicable | Design mockup approved before building |
| Placement responsibility | Yours, including rework if a carrier declines | Split, and usually undocumented | Set to the USPS window and to the approved spec |
| Existing post removal | Your scope entirely | Sometimes, at an unpriced rate | Replaces and resets existing aging posts |
| Warranty exposure | Product warranty from one party, workmanship from you | Effectively none you can hold | 1-year warranty across the build, one party to call |
| Schedule you can bid to | Freight date, then your crew availability | Availability-dependent | 2 to 3 weeks from mockup approval, longer for LED or vault |
| Honest tradeoff | Cheapest product line, highest rework risk | Lowest price, no documentation to close out | Premium pricing, and made to order instead of off a shelf |
"The contractors who bid this well ask us for two numbers, not one. Product per unit, install per unit, exceptions named separately. The ones who get surprised asked for a total, then discovered the old posts were set in a concrete mass nobody priced."
Dream Mailboxes team
Carry the mailbox scope as three lines rather than one. A lump sum for the approved standard multiplied by the confirmed count. A schedule of unit prices covering demolition, exceptions, irrigation repair, restoration, and catch-up visits. An allowance line for anything the pre-bid walk could not quantify.
Three lines beat one for a practical reason: boards revise counts and phase projects. When the association decides to do the front two streets this fiscal year and the rest next, a three-line structure becomes two smaller contracts without a rebid. A single lump sum has to be reopened, and reopening a price is where your margin gets renegotiated.
Offer pillar units at the entries as an alternate, since faux stone or marble at the two entry lots reads as a community upgrade for a small number of units. Offer an upgrade tier for any oversized or package-vault location. If the community has aging posts that are structurally fine, a reset and refinish alternate on a subset of the community can bring the total back under a budget the board already published to owners.
Two things about this scope are worth telling the association before award instead of after.
The first is price. A custom USA-made unit with an included professional install costs more than a catalog box and a handyman. What the association is buying is a filed specification, a color formula, a placement that meets both requirements, and one party holding the warranty. That is a defensible number, and it is easier to defend at bid time than at the first board meeting after install.
The second is schedule. Made to order means nothing ships until the mockup is approved, and standard builds run 2 to 3 weeks from that approval, longer for LED or vault models. Build that into the bid schedule as a submittal and approval duration with the board named as the responsible party. On these projects the board review is reliably the longest line on the bar chart.
When you are ready to price it, send the community details, the home count, and a site plan. You will get unit pricing separated by product and install, a spec sheet the board can vote on, and an install scope written to the footing detail rather than to a photo.
Call a vendor that designs, builds, and installs, so product, placement, and warranty sit in one subcontract. Dream Mailboxes quotes whole communities from South Florida and serves nationwide: a spec sheet the board and ARC can vote on, a mockup approved before fabrication, and installation at $499 standard, $699 pillar, or $799 extra-large per unit. Send the home count and a site plan to get pricing you can drop onto a bid form.
Pass the supply and install through if you do not already set posts to a measured placement window, and keep demolition, utility repair, restoration, and resident coordination in your own scope. A published per-unit install price prices more predictably than your crew learning a new tolerance across a couple hundred lots, and it puts rework exposure with the party that set the post.
Existing footings beyond a defined volume, association-owned irrigation and low voltage repair beyond a stated allowance, restoration outside the rock bed, unsuitable subgrade, hardscape cutting and patching, addresses inaccessible on the scheduled day beyond a stated number of catch-up visits, permits, and owner-furnished items such as resident notice and gate access. Add unit-price add and deduct language so a changed count is arithmetic.
The post is set in concrete roughly 2 feet deep over a 4-inch footer, the box is placed to the USPS height and setback window, and the base is finished with a decorative rock bed. Existing aging posts can be replaced and reset by the same crew. Pricing is tiered at $499 standard, $699 pillar, and $799 extra-large per unit, which is what makes it a line you can carry rather than a variable.
No. The architectural standard and the USPS placement rules are separate requirements and both have to be met. USPS expects the bottom of a curbside box 41 to 45 inches above the road surface and 6 to 8 inches back from the curb face, per the USPS guidelines. Write both into your scope of work so the crew solves for both on every lot.
We are a family-founded, USA-made custom mailbox company headquartered in South Florida, serving communities nationwide. We write the spec sheet a board approves, build to an approved mockup, and install at the curb ourselves, so a general contractor carries one subcontract instead of a supplier plus an installer.
The rest of the contractor and estimating track, from first call to bid comparison.
