By Quentin Trisler — Pittsburgh real estate investor
Every investor eventually runs the same math. You get a rehab bid back from a general contractor, you see the number, and you think: I could save 20% doing this myself. And you’re not wrong. A GC’s markup on a full rehab usually runs somewhere between 15% and 25% of the job. On a $60,000 rehab, that’s real money — $9,000 to $15,000 you could keep.
I’m Quentin Trisler, and I’ve been in construction for over twenty years. I self-GC most of my own projects here in Pittsburgh. So you’d think my answer would be simple: always do it yourself. It’s not. Self-GCing saves money on some deals and quietly costs you money on others, and the difference usually isn’t the one people expect.
What self-GCing actually means
Being your own general contractor doesn’t mean swinging the hammer yourself — though I do plenty of that too. It means you are the one lining up the subs, pulling the permits, sequencing the work, ordering materials so they show up when the crew does, and catching the problems before they compound. The GC’s markup isn’t just profit. You’re paying for someone whose full-time job is making sure the plumber doesn’t show up before the framing is done and the tile guy doesn’t tile over a floor that isn’t level.
When you self-GC, that job becomes yours. And it’s a real job.
When it actually saves you money
Self-GCing pays off when three things are true:
- You have the relationships. The whole thing lives or dies on your subs. If you’ve got an electrician, a plumber, and an HVAC guy who pick up the phone and show up when they say they will, you’re most of the way there. Building that bench takes years — it’s the part nobody can hand you.
- You have the time. Managing a rehab is a near-daily commitment. If you’ve got a W-2 job and you’re trying to run a gut job on your lunch breaks, you’re going to feel it in the timeline.
- You actually know the work. You don’t have to be a master tradesman, but you need to know enough to tell when a sub is cutting corners or padding a bill. If you can’t tell good work from bad, you’re not really saving the GC fee — you’re just paying it to yourself and getting worse results.
When those three line up, the savings are real, and they go straight to your bottom line.
When it quietly costs you money
Here’s the part that took me years to fully respect: the biggest cost of self-GCing usually isn’t a line item. It’s time.
A pro GC running a full crew might turn a rehab in six weeks. You, doing it yourself around everything else in your life, might take twelve. That extra six weeks isn’t free. If you’re on hard money at, say, 11% plus points on a $200,000 loan, you’re burning roughly $1,800 a month in interest alone — before taxes, insurance, and utilities on a property that’s producing nothing. Add it up and a “slow” rehab can eat $3,000 to $4,000 a month in holding costs.
Do the math on that. If self-GCing saved you $12,000 in GC markup but added three months to your timeline on expensive money, you may have handed most of that savings right back — and you did a lot more work to get there. On a flip, a blown timeline can also mean listing into a worse season. On a BRRRR, it delays your refinance and your ability to recycle the capital into the next deal.
The GC fee is visible. The holding cost is the one that sneaks up on you.
The subs will make or break you
If you take one thing from this, take this: your rehab moves at the speed of your slowest, flakiest sub. I’ve watched an entire project stall for two weeks because one trade ghosted and everything behind them was stacked up waiting. A good GC has backups and leverage — they throw enough work at their crews that they get prioritized. When you’re a one-off self-GC calling around for a plumber, you’re at the back of the line.
The way you fix that is by becoming a repeat customer worth showing up for. Pay fast, pay fair, treat people right, and give them steady work. The relationships are the actual asset here — more than any single project.
So should you do it?
My honest take, after twenty-plus years:
- Self-GC when you have the relationships, the time, and the knowledge — and especially on cosmetic-to-moderate rehabs where the sequencing is straightforward and the downside of a delay is small.
- Hire the GC when the job is a heavy gut with complex sequencing, when your money is expensive and speed matters more than the markup, or when you simply don’t have the bandwidth to babysit it. Paying 20% to protect a tight timeline on hard money is sometimes the cheapest money you’ll ever spend.
The investors who get burned are usually the ones who self-GC to save a fee they can see, without pricing in the holding cost they can’t. Run both numbers before you decide. The right answer changes deal to deal — and knowing which situation you’re in is worth more than the fee either way.
—Quentin Trisler