The enquiry call: the questions a pro asks before quoting anything

A landscaper’s phone rings. Ten minutes later they either book a site visit or they do not, and the caller usually has no idea a decision was made.

That call is not small talk. A site visit, a measure-up, a concept sketch and a priced quote is somewhere between half a day and two days of unpaid work. No sensible contractor spends that on every enquiry, so they spend ten minutes working out which enquiries are real. Across the Perth trade you will hear figures like half of all enquiries never becoming a quote. That is not rudeness. It is arithmetic.

You are your own client, so nobody is going to ring you and ask these questions. You have to ask them of yourself, out loud, and write the answers down. It is the cheapest hour of the entire project.

The ten questions, and what each one is really testing

#	The question	What it is actually testing
1	What’s the address?	Suburb tells them soil, likely limestone depth, block era, council, travel time and tip runs
2	What’s the access like?	Side gate width, verge, slope. This is the number one hidden cost multiplier
3	What’s prompting this now?	The real driver behind the job, which is rarely the thing first mentioned
4	What’s there now, and what’s staying?	Demolition, disposal and the risk of what is under the existing paving
5	What’s the budget range?	Whether the job is possible at all
6	When do you want it finished?	Whether the timeline is physically and seasonally achievable
7	Who else is part of the decision?	Whether the site visit will need to be repeated
8	Have you had other quotes?	Where you are in the process, and what you have already been told
9	Do you have a design, or do you need one?	Whether this is a design job, a build job, or both
10	Is anything holding it up?	Approvals, neighbours, fences, trees, a pool, a pending sale

Why access is question two and not question nine

On a 1990s Perth survey-strata block the side access is often about 900 mm between the wall and the fence, with a meter box and a downpipe in it. That one measurement decides whether limestone blocks arrive by bobcat or by wheelbarrow, and whether excavated sand leaves the same way. The difference is not 10 per cent. It can double the labour on the earthworks and demolition line.

A pro asks early because it changes the quote more than the paving choice does. Go and measure yours now: narrowest point, gate width, and the height of anything overhead.

Why “what’s prompting this now” beats “what do you want”

Ask someone what they want and you get a materials list — decking, a firepit, maybe some artificial turf. Ask what prompted the call and you get the actual brief: the dog has destroyed the lawn, the neighbours built a two-storey and the back yard lost its privacy, a toddler is about to start walking near an unfenced drop, or the reticulation has failed and the whole garden is dying in February.

The second answer tells you what “finished” has to achieve. The first tells you what someone saw on Instagram. Needs, wants and the five-year view pulls this apart properly.

Why the budget question is asked plainly

Amateur operators dance around money and then waste two days quoting a job that was never affordable. Professionals ask directly, usually with a range attached: “Most backyards like yours land between X and Y — does that sound like the right neighbourhood?”

If the caller will not give a range, the professional has learnt something either way. Either the number is embarrassingly low, or the caller genuinely has no idea what landscaping costs, which is fixable, or they are price-shopping and intend to use your quote to beat someone else’s down. The money conversation gives you the Perth bands so you can answer this one honestly to yourself.

What a professional does with the answers

They are making four judgements, in this order.

1. Is it real? A caller with an address, a driver, a rough number and a timeline is a project. A caller with none of those is browsing.
2. Is it possible? Budget against scope, timeline against season and approvals.
3. Is it ours? A firm that builds limestone retaining and paving does not want a native-planting-and-retic job, and will say so.
4. Is it worth the unpaid hours? Quoting is a real cost, carried as overhead, which means the quotes a firm loses are paid for by the clients it wins.

Note what is missing: nowhere in there is “how nice does this person sound”.

The warning signs that make a pro walk away

• Budget refusal. “Just give me a ballpark and we’ll see.” Nothing gets quoted off that.
• One decider on the phone, two in the house. The site visit will be run twice and the design will be reopened after the second one.
• “We’ve already had three quotes.” Quote four is being used as leverage.
• A timeline that ignores the calendar. Someone ringing in mid-November wanting turf, paving and planting finished before Christmas.
• Scope that grows during the call. It started as a courtyard and by minute eight there is a pool.
• An unresolved dispute. A shared retaining wall, a dividing fence the neighbour has not agreed to, or an existing structure with no approval. See dividing fences and retaining wall approvals.

When you catch yourself producing one of these answers about your own project, that is the signal — not to abandon it, but to fix that specific thing before going further.

The WA-specific parts of this call

The $20,000 line. Landscaping is explicitly named as “home building work” in WA. Once your project crosses into permitted building work valued at $20,000 or more, you are generally in registered-builder territory, with home indemnity insurance attached. A Perth landscaper qualifying an enquiry is quietly working out which side of that line the job sits on, because it changes who can contract for it. DIY vs subcontract is where that decision gets made.

There is a recent and important exception. Since 1 July 2026, constructing a Class 10a building valued under $50,000 no longer requires a registered building contractor in Western Australia — and Class 10a covers a great deal of what a landscaping project actually builds: patios, pergolas, carports, sheds and similar non-habitable structures. That is a genuine change, so do not rely on what a tradesperson told you two years ago.

Be careful not to over-read it, though. Three separate questions are involved and this exemption only answers the first:

Question	What the exemption changes
Must a registered building contractor do the work?	Not for Class 10a under $50,000, from 1 July 2026
Do you still need a building permit?	Unchanged — ask your council
Is home indemnity insurance still triggered?	Unchanged — it turns on permitted work over $20,000

Confirm all three with Building and Energy and your own council before you assume a structure is outside the system. Structures and building permits works through it properly.

The calendar. Perth has a real build season. The winter sprinkler switch-off runs 1 June to 31 August for scheme and bore water alike, and establishing new lawn or garden in that window needs an approved exemption. Laying turf in January is a watering problem; laying it in July is a permission problem. A contractor asking “when do you want it finished” is asking a harder question here than in Melbourne. Bores, the roster and the winter ban has the detail.

What is under the existing garden. On a renovation, the enquiry call cannot tell anyone whether there is limestone at 400 mm, coffee rock, or a decade of buried builder’s rubble under the lawn. A good contractor says so on the phone and prices the excavation as a provisional item. Your equivalent is Perth soils and auditing an existing garden.

Now run the call on yourself

Sit down with the ten questions and answer them in writing, in your workbook, the way you would answer a stranger on the phone. Short answers. No hedging on the money one.

Then read your own answers back as if you were the contractor deciding whether to take the job, and mark the ones that would have made you hesitate.

The next lesson, the consultation visit, takes those answers onto the block and turns them into observations — the structured ninety-minute walk-through that a professional runs before they will put a single number on paper.