What does Basement or Crawlspace Waterproofing Cost?

That is a great question.   And I promise this is not one of those rambling clickbait pages that tell you nothing in the end.  If you read through the whole page, you will get real answers, AND understand them in context.  But if you just skip to the end, you won’t have a clear understanding of what you are looking at.

If you call 100 waterproofing companies, 99 of them will tell you that they can’t give you a number over the phone - only an inspector can determine the cost.  While there is a certain amount of truth to that, that isn’t the real reason they won’t tell you anything about price over the phone.  The real reason they won’t tell you over the phone is sticker shock.  The truth is…basement and crawlspace waterproofing is expensive.  If they told you the cost over the phone, you would hang up and say ‘forget it…no way am I doing that’.  Then you would go down into the basement and continue vacuuming up the water that came in from last nights rain.   But if a salesmen tells you the price while he is in your home, he gets a chance to convince you that it is worth the money.   Waterproofing companies know this, and that is why they will not give you a price over the phone. 

And truth be told….it IS worth the money.  But why is it worth it?  Well here’s the big secret…. you aren’t really buying waterproofing.   You are buying peace of mind.    Every time it rains and you get that tight feeling in your stomach, worried if water is going to come in again, and if it will turn into mold, or other even bigger problems….what you are purchasing is freedom from that feeling.   A $100 shop vac may be enough to get the water off the floor (hopefully), but not even the best shop vac in the world can get rid of that feeling for you.   A professional Waterproofer CAN. 

So…ok.  But why all the secrecy behind the price?  2 main reasons from 2 different types of companies.

1. Most locally owned companies don’t like letting their competitors know their prices, afraid that they’ll get undercut and lose business.
2. Most large National Franchise companies (and even some of the large locally owned ones) don’t use a price list to determine the cost….they still use a method called PAR selling.  The readers digest version of PAR selling is that they look at you, your house, your cars, your clothes and they ask themselves “how much can i get from these people?”…and that’s how they come up with their price.  To learn more about how par selling works, click here.  (Please take the time to click and read more about this.  It will help protect you from aggressive salesmen in just about every home improvement service.)

OK….so on to what you REALLY want to know.   How much does it cost?  Well….there are MANY variables that affect the cost for any particular basement.  Foundation type, footer type, finished basement or unfinished basement, height of crawlspace, etc…. So I can’t tell you exactly what YOUR basement or crawlspace would cost, but I can give you a list of the main items that build your quote, and the per item cost for those.

Basement and Crawlspace Waterproofing Costs

DISCOUNTS: 

Everybody loves a discount.  While you will never get a hard ‘DROP’ from us like you’ll experience from the bigger companies, we do offer discounts - but we typically ask for something in return.  Maybe signs in the yard, or flexible scheduling.  But the biggest discounts we offer are for Economy of Scale.  Put simply…the more you do, the bigger a discount we can offer.  WHY?  Because we are already there.  We already spent time driving to the material lot, driving to your house, setting up the work area, reviewing the job.  That alone probably takes most of the morning.   So we can do more work for you now at a cheaper rate than we could do that same work at someone else’s house on a different day where we would have to do all of that setup work again.   Our discounts typically range from 5-15%, depending on the circumstances.

CAVEATS:  (DO NOT SKIP THIS SECTION OR YOU WILL BE SURPRISED LATER…and not in a good way)

• The prices listed above refer to INTERIOR waterproofing only.  Exterior waterproofing is a whole different ballgame and much harder to breakdown into a simple table.

• Some of these items are optional.  You get to decide how much peace of mind you want.

• A french Drain requires at least 1 sump pump up to 130’.  We HIGHLY recommend 2 pumps beyond 130’.  At 150’, a 2nd pump is REQUIRED.

• This list represents the MAJORITY of what makes up any specific quote.  There numerous other additional items that MIGHT be required in any specific situation.  (Window well taps, grate drains, oil tank wraps, MonoPour or high footers, etc etc…).  Adding all of them to this table would make it difficult to digest, and most of them are items that a typical homeowner would have no way of knowing if they need them or not.  So in an effort to keep things simple, I did not include them in this table.  (But shoot me an email and I’ll be happy to discuss them with you if you have specific questions.)

• This list does NOT include any additional work that may be required, such as electrical outlets, finished wall demolition, permits, engineering fees, repair of finished walls or flooring, etc.

BUT WHY IS IT SO EXPENSIVE??

Ok….so now you have a rough idea of what it is going to cost.  The next natural question is “WHY does it cost so much?”  A fair question.  The reasons differ based on the type of company, but here are a few.

For local family owned businesses, the costs tend to be high due to marketing cost, insurance and the cost of labor. 

Marketing Costs: If you are reading this, odds are you found us on google.  That costs money…more now than ever before. The PE firms came into this industry with a plan.  Pour money into marketing, raising the cost of online marketing to the point that it is not sustainable to small companies.  Their goal is to drive them out of business and capture as much market share as possible.  (In our market, there are over 100 competitors.  Figure most of them average between $1-2M /year. Compare that to our biggest competitor who does roughly $50M/year.  In their eyes there is still another $100-200M/year of market share out there. 

Insurance:  Any reputable company will be fully insured, including worker’s comp (did you know if you hire a contractor that does NOT have workers comp insurance, YOU could be liable if their workers get hurt on your property?).  Unfortunately do to the large number of ‘Chuck in a Truck’ contractors out there who don’t really know what they are doing…insurance rates in our industry have gone up significantly in the past decade.  Top Tier providers (Nationwide, State Farm, Farmers, Etc) won’t even cover our industry anymore.    So we are all forced to find coverage from high cost commercial providers…even companies that have zero claims.  In short, we are all paying for other people’s mistakes.  But there’s no way around it.

Labor:

Closely connected to the insurance issue is labor.  We cannot do this work properly and safely without highly experienced and well trained labor.  It might look like simple work to you, but the devil is in the details.  And those details can mean the difference between a dry, healthy basement, or a collapsed wall.  As you watch the workers who are about to cut open your basement floor or cut a hole through your foundation wall, ask yourself.  “Do you really want that person to be making minimum wage?”  Of course not.  You want that person to be well experienced, well trained, and well paid.  Your house is no place for rookies.  And for most local, family owned companies - experience is what you get.  But that costs money.

So when you look at the cost of Foundation Waterproofing, don’t think that all that money is going to my yacht payment or towards my vacation house in Fiji!  (Though that very well might be where it’s going if you go with one of the big national franchises!).