San Diego, CA
NEW ADDITIONS ESTIMATING.

## Estimating Room Additions in San Diego Is Not Simple Math San Diego addition work carries layers most estimating spreadsheets miss. You are dealing with California Title 24 energy compliance on every permitted addition. You are navigating Coastal Development Permits if the project sits within the Coastal Zone, which covers a significant strip of the city from La Jolla down through Point Loma and Ocean Beach. And you are waiting on the City of San Diego Development Services Department, which has some of the longer residential permit review timelines in Southern California. Add the regional labor market — framing, electrical, plumbing, and drywall subs here run higher than the California statewide average — and a bid built on national cost data will lose you money before the slab is poured. Estimate.Pro is built to handle that specificity without slowing you down. ## From Walkthrough to Sendable Bid in 8 Minutes The median time from walkthrough to a sendable bid on Estimate.Pro is 8 minutes. You do the site walk, capture measurements with AR on supported devices (camera and photo measurements are flagged as estimates), and the app builds a scope-of-work draft from what you recorded. You review, adjust for your San Diego sub rates, and send. That speed matters here. San Diego homeowners in established neighborhoods — North Park, Kensington, Allied Gardens — are often getting two or three bids within 48 hours of a first call. A polished, itemized estimate the same day you walk the site converts at a higher rate than one that arrives four days later in a PDF that looks like it was built in 2009. ## What the App Covers for Addition Work Estimate.Pro supports 25 trades, and addition contracting pulls from several of them in a single project. A master suite addition over an existing garage typically touches framing, roofing, electrical (you will reference NEC load calculations for the new square footage), plumbing rough-in, HVAC sizing — Manual J for California Climate Zone 7 in coastal San Diego or Zone 10 inland — insulation to Title 24 requirements, drywall, and finish work. You build all of that inside one job file. Line items pull from your saved material cost workspace, so the lumber prices you negotiated with your supplier last week are the lumber prices in your bid, not a national index that is two quarters stale. For larger crews, the Crew plan ($399/month flat) covers your whole team under one subscription. Solo operators and two-person shops fit well on Pro ($39/seat/month). Elite ($79/seat/month) adds Stripe Connect invoicing with 0% platform fee and invoice exports, which matters when you are collecting deposits on a $180,000 master suite job. ## California-Specific Compliance You Cannot Skip Title 24 Part 6 energy standards apply to additions over a certain square footage threshold, and San Diego's Coastal Zone triggers the California Coastal Act permitting layer on top of standard DSD review. If your addition project is in the Coastal Zone, budget extra time and fee into your estimate before you present it to the client. Homeowners often do not know the distinction until you explain it. You should also account for the City of San Diego's FAR (Floor Area Ratio) and lot coverage rules, which vary by zone. RS-1-7 single-family zones in older neighborhoods have different allowances than RS-1-14. Getting the zoning research done before the bid protects you from promising a 600 square foot addition on a lot that can only support 400. Estimate.Pro does not replace your zoning lookup, but it gives you a line-item structure where you can document assumptions and notes directly in the scope-of-work so the client sees exactly what conditions the bid is based on. ## No Platform Fee to Start Estimate.Pro has a free forever tier. No credit card required to start. You can build your first San Diego addition estimate, use the AR measurement tools, and send a bid before you spend a dollar. If the software earns its place in your process, you move to a paid plan. If it does not, you owe nothing. For addition contractors who are already running tight margins on complex jobs, that is the right way to evaluate a tool. ## Built for the Way You Actually Work You do not sit at a desk re-keying data from a legal pad into three different programs. You are on site in Clairemont in the morning, in a DSD permit line in Mission Valley at noon, and pricing a second bid by 4 PM. Estimate.Pro is a field operating system, not office software that happens to have a mobile view. The workflow goes: walkthrough, scope, price, send — in the time it takes to drive back from the site.