The question about an architect's responsibility to use a bid room to optimize the bid pool is about relationships. Your client benefits from having a wide pool of bidders and the plan rooms benefit when their members have access to the bid documents at minimal expense. The relationship fails when the bid rooms do not properly disseminate information during the bid period nor bear the true cost of providing paper documents to their members. The burden for those failures is borne by your client. It seems reasonable to expect the bid rooms to bear the cost of printing the documents if they insist on using paper.
I started practicing in the 70s and have never been able to get bidder info from such entities because they have no way to track it. I'll be interested to hear if anyone has a strategy to solve that.
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Jeffrey Barr AIA
General Manager
MC Consultants
Oakland CA
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