Why the Cost of Structural Steel Varies
Many commercial buildings are constructed with structural steel. The cost of structural steel can vary dramatically, so in most cases, there is an urgency in ordering the steel in a timely manner in order to get the best price. That’s why architects, contractors and engineers strive to get blueprint drawings completed as quickly as possible. The services for blueprint printing Phoenix area professionals use most are the ones that produce excellent results, fast. The price of the steel has a big bearing on the cost of the final building project as a whole, because it one of the main construction materials. In order to understand why the cost of structural steel varies, it helps to know more about the supply chain.
When a commercial steel building is designed by an architect or builder, they send out the project for bids to a steel fabricator. The fabricator looks at the blueprints for the building and calculates how many tons of steel will be needed to complete the project. The fabricator then gets a quote from a steel wholesaler for the price of the steel. With that number in hand, the fabricator puts in their bid to the builder with a profit margin built in. If the fabricator wins the bid, they then order the steel from the steel wholesaler. It’s important for the fabricator to accurately calculate how much steel will be needed. If they order too little, they will have to order additional steel at current market price and absorb the extra cost.
The steel wholesaler acts as a representative for a steel mill. The steel mill takes the raw material and pours it into long lengths of varying shapes, like tubes, beams and rods. In order to process the raw material, the steel mill uses hot furnaces. The hot furnaces burn oil to operate. So the price that the steel wholesaler offers to the fabricator relies in part on the price of oil at any given time. The higher the price of oil, the more the steel mill has to pay in order to run their business. They then pass on that cost to the steel fabricator through the price-per-ton quote. Another reliance on the price of oil is integrated into the cost of transportation to ship the steel parts to the fabricator. Once again, the higher the price of fuel, the more the fabricator has to pay for freight delivery.
The cost of structural steel fluctuates according to these market changes, and this gets translated to cost variations in the price of commercial building construction. This is another reason why the services for blueprint printing Phoenix professionals rely on offer quick turnaround. The faster the building materials can be ordered, the better the budget can be managed.
