WATERPROOFING: BURIED WORK, EXHUMED BLAME
Below-grade waterproofing is invisible at acceptance and excavated only at failure, sometimes a decade later: latent-defect statutes commonly run 10 years, and forensic cases turn on installation details nobody photographed.
This page covers one problem. The full picture for this trade, including the other places margin leaks, is on the waterproofing operating system page.
WHERE THE MONEY GOES.
Below-grade waterproofing is invisible at acceptance and excavated only at failure, sometimes a decade later: latent-defect statutes commonly run 10 years, and forensic cases turn on installation details nobody photographed. One published IIBEC litigation case study on a nine-year-old university building traced chronic flooding to membrane terminated below grade without counterflashing and caulking installed thinner than the manufacturer's minimum without backer rod, contradicting ASTM C1193. Every finding was an installation-documentation question the contractor could have answered with photos and inspection logs from year zero.
THE COST, SOURCED.
IIBEC below-grade failure case study (termination, counterflashing, C1193 findings); 10-year latent-defect exposure (construction-defect practice reporting).
THE NUMBER TO MEASURE IT AGAINST.
Waterproofing contractors run about % net profit at $1M to $5M, rising to roughly 11% at $5M to $10M. The CFOS target at $1M to $5M is11%, set at 10 percent before taxes or 3.5 points better than your trade's average at your revenue, whichever is higher. A problem like this one lives in the distance between those two figures rather than in a loss on any single job.
Gross margin over the same bands runs % to 27%, against a CFOS target of 11%.
THE SYSTEM THAT FIXES THIS.
Cost codes built against the estimate, so a job can be read while it runs.
FREQUENTLY ASKED.
