Construction is one of the most reliable verticals in Texas private security, and one of the easiest to lose. The work is straightforward — an unlit site, a perimeter that is temporary by design, and equipment worth more than the fence around it — but the contracts turn on documentation, not on presence. General contractors renew with the company that can prove what happened overnight.
This guide covers both sides: how to run and price a jobsite post if you are the security company, and what to require if you are the contractor buying it.
Why jobsites get hit
The economics favor the thief. Copper wire, lumber, appliances and fixtures are sitting in the open and are effectively untraceable once removed. Heavy equipment carries serial numbers that almost nobody checks at resale. Power tools disappear in ones and twos, below the threshold where anyone files a claim, until the total shows up in the job cost report. The site is dark, the perimeter fencing is temporary, and on a multi-contractor job nobody is quite sure whose responsibility the north gate is.
A few conditions make it worse in Texas specifically. Rapid development means dozens of active sites within a short drive of each other, which is exactly the pattern organized crews look for. Sprawl puts a lot of jobsites a long way from the nearest patrol response. And summer nights are quiet enough that a truck at the gate at 2 a.m. is unlikely to be witnessed by anyone who is not paid to be there.
Do not carry someone else’s loss statistics into your proposal. Ask the contractor what they have actually lost on their last three jobs, in dollars and in schedule delay. That number is the one that justifies your service, and it is the one they will believe.
Coverage models
Standing night guard. The most common arrangement: one officer covering the hours between the last trade leaving and the first arriving. It is the baseline against which everything else is priced.
Continuous coverage. Used during high-exposure phases — when major equipment is staged, when finish materials are on site, or after an incident has already happened. Expensive, and worth proposing as a phase rather than a default.
Roving patrol. An officer checks the site several times per night on a route covering multiple properties. Cheaper per site and appropriate for early phases with little on the ground, but understand what you are buying: presence at intervals, not deterrence between them.
Gate guard. Access control during working hours — logging trades in and out, checking deliveries, enforcing the site’s entry rules. Often sold alongside night coverage on larger jobs.
Cameras. A supplement, not a substitute. Early-phase sites usually have no power, so you are into solar or battery units; the site layout changes constantly, so fields of view need revisiting; and a camera documents a theft rather than interrupting one. Price the monitoring, not just the hardware.
How to cost a jobsite post properly
Ignore any rule of thumb that prices security as a percentage of project value. A percentage tells you nothing about how many hours of coverage you are actually buying, and two bids built that way are not comparable.
Cost it from the post upward:
- Hours of coverage per day, by phase. Night-only during framing may become continuous during finish-out.
- Days per week, including weekends and holidays. Weekend coverage is where jobsite security budgets quietly double, and it is the coverage most often left out of a low bid.
- Bill rate for the post type — unarmed standing, armed, gate, or per-visit patrol. Build that rate from your own loaded cost as set out in how to price guard services; do not quote a market rate you read somewhere.
- Duration of each phase, since a jobsite contract is a sequence of different services rather than one flat monthly fee.
- Adjustments: travel time to remote sites, supervisor visit frequency, holiday premium hours, and any equipment you are providing.
Multiply it out phase by phase. The result is a number both sides can audit, and it lets you propose reducing coverage in low-risk phases — which is usually what wins the job against a competitor quoting one flat rate for eighteen months.
What general contractors are actually buying
Superintendents do not renew because the site was quiet. They renew because they could see it was covered. In practice that means:
- Reliability — the officer is there, every night, on time
- Proof of presence — GPS-verified arrival and patrol, not a signature on a clipboard
- Immediate contact — someone reaches the superintendent when something happens, not in the morning report
- Flexibility — coverage scales with the phase without renegotiating the contract
- Readable reports — a daily record with photos of site condition that a project manager can skim in two minutes
Demonstrate those five in the pitch rather than describing them. Open the app, scan a checkpoint, show the report that lands.
Post orders that hold up on a jobsite
- Patrol the full perimeter on a defined interval, varying the exact timing
- Check every gate and confirm it is secured, by gate, not “all gates”
- Photograph staged equipment against the expected inventory
- Walk material storage and note anything moved since the previous shift
- Log every arrival and departure outside working hours, with plate and company
- Record weather that affects the site — wind on scaffolding, standing water, temporary power exposed to rain
- Report safety hazards found on patrol, not just security ones; this is the item superintendents value most and the one most companies omit
With QR or NFC checkpoints you can fix those into a route: scan points at the equipment yard, each gate and the material lay-down area, with a photo required at each one, a minimum patrol frequency, and an alert when a tour is missed or closed incomplete. In CGuardPro each scan is checked against the checkpoint’s location on the server, and a supervisor can review the tour point by point afterwards and reject a scan that does not hold up. One thing to be straight about: scans queue when the officer has no signal, but the server timestamps them on arrival, so the checkpoint is proven while the clock reads the sync time — worth explaining to a client before they notice it themselves.
Access control and the insurance file
Site access control on an active jobsite is governed by the general contractor’s own safety plan, and the rules vary by project. Get the plan in writing and build your post orders from it rather than assuming a standard: who is allowed on site after hours, what the sign-in requirement is, what PPE the officer enforces at the gate, and who the officer calls first.
Keep the documentation in a form an adjuster will accept — patrol records with verifiable times, incident reports with photographs, access logs, and equipment inventory notes. Whether it affects a premium is between the contractor and their carrier, and worth asking them directly; what is certain is that a claim with a documented patrol history is a much shorter conversation than one without.
For contractors hiring security
Require GPS-verified patrol records and read them, not just receive them. Get client portal access so you can look at last night without asking anyone. Put patrol frequency, reporting format and escalation contacts in the written post orders rather than the sales proposal. Review the reports weekly — patterns show up there before losses do. And ask every bidder to quote by post hours and phase, so you can compare the bids at all.
CGuardPro runs the tour verification, photo reports, instant alerts and client portal that jobsite contracts turn on, including for companies working the Austin construction market. Book a walkthrough with a live site and see the report a superintendent would actually receive.