Two Potholes in an Industrial Yard, One Visit, Real Cost
In June we fixed two potholes in an industrial yard in central Auckland. The inquiry was a model of how to do it: the owner paced out both holes, wrote "one area is 0.5m x 0.5m and the other is 1.5m x 0.5m approx" in the notes field, ticked shallow, attached two photos and hit send. We had a fixed price back to him that day and the job invoiced at a touch over $1,200 including GST, both patches done in a single morning.
Worth pulling apart, because yard owners keep making the same expensive decision that he didn't.
The mistake: fixing potholes one at a time
Small asphalt jobs carry a fixed cost that has nothing to do with the hole. Crew travel, plant on the truck, hot mix minimums, traffic setup if the yard is live. That overhead is the reason a single small patch starts from $450 when the material in it might be eighty dollars' worth.
Fix two holes in one visit and you pay that overhead once. Fix them three months apart and you pay it twice, plus the second hole spent three winter months growing. On this job, doing both patches together meant the second one cost only marginally more than its material and labour, because the crew was already standing in the yard with a hot box.
If your yard has one obvious pothole and two "keep an eye on those" spots, price them together. The marginal cost of an extra patch while we're there is small; the cost of a second mobilisation isn't.
Why yards fail differently from carparks
A retail carpark gets thousands of light vehicles distributed across the whole surface. A yard gets a few dozen heavy movements a day concentrated on the same two or three wheel paths, and half of them are turning or reversing under load. Forklifts are the worst offenders; all the weight sits on small hard wheels, and a loaded forklift spinning on one spot does more damage in a second than a parked truck does in a week.
So yard potholes appear on the turning circles and the container line, they arrive in pairs and threes rather than alone, and they deepen fast because the next sixty heavy passes go straight through the same puddle. Shallow now genuinely means cheap now. The Ellerslie holes were under 5 cm deep; caught in that window, they were cut, boxed and filled without any base rebuild. Six months later that's not the quote you get.
What a yard patch involves
The method is the same one we use on commercial carparks, with one difference: compaction matters more. A patch that would carry cars for a decade can rut under a loaded hiab in a year if the base wasn't compacted properly, so we compact in lifts and roll the hot mix to refusal rather than just flattening it.
Yard work also means working around your operation. Both Ellerslie patches went in without closing the yard; we coned off one hole at a time and the forklifts kept running. Tell us your quiet window in the notes field and the crew plans around it.
Getting a price
Measurements like that owner's are gold, but they're optional. Two photos per hole (one close for edge condition, one wide for location) and your best guess at depth gets you a fixed written price, usually same day. The quote covers everything: cut, removal, base compaction, hot mix, rolling, sweep-up. GST itemised, nothing on completion day you haven't already seen in writing.
Frequently asked questions
How long before the yard can run over the patches?
Hot mix takes rubber-tyred traffic within a few hours of rolling. For heavy forklifts on small wheels we'd rather you gave a fresh patch until the next morning, but the yard around it is usable the whole time.
Is there a minimum job size?
The from-$450 single patch is the practical minimum. If you've got several small failures, they batch into that same visit cheaply, which is the whole point of this post.
Do you do the whole yard if it's past patching?
If more than about a third of the surface is failing, patching stops making financial sense and we'll say so in the quote rather than sell you patches. Resurfacing is a different conversation with different numbers.
Walk the yard, count the holes, pace out the big ones if you can. Then send photos of the lot through the quote form and get one fixed price for one visit.
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