Yes, thanks, that was more or less what I meant. The individual surcharge is of course not relevant here either. Our architect's concept also involves preselected GCs.
Not gladly, yes. But that is basically no different than coming from the start with your own scope of work (which I generally recommend). GCs who send away every client with their own scope of work could soon be out of business.
I also think it doesn’t hurt to get two more offers (were recommended to us by the construction advisor, one of the GCs is also on our architect’s list (he has a rating system for whom he tenders to…)). We liked one company quite a bit, but the contract/offer doesn’t suit us 100% so far (too many details, e.g. requiring a security deposit or retaining less for final acceptance). We are still negotiating that.
Originally, we would have done it with our own scope of work anyway, but got a bit nervous because of rising construction costs. But I now think that the increases are already priced in and we haven’t yet seen any proper fixed-price contracts.
Basically, the offers are as expected, simply hard to compare.
A bit of competition never hurts; we will find some GC anyway.
In one’s own scope of work, formulations like: masonry according to the GC’s scope of work also find their way in.