In the mortgage field services industry, the illusion of opportunity has become its own form of exploitation. For every government Request for Information (RFI) or Sources Sought Notice that demands hours of unpaid labor to prove “capability,” there are a dozen so-called “bid opportunities” distributed by the industry’s major players like National Order Mills and Prime Vendors that are never awarded to the independent labor force they target. Instead, these bids function as fishing expeditions, gathering pricing data and market intelligence from the very Field Service Technicians and Inspectors they later undercut. These companies collect the bids, analyze the responses, and then route the actual work to their own internal W2 crews, leaving the independent small business owners who bid in good faith unpaid, unseen, and expendable.
For years, this pattern has persisted beneath a veneer of legitimacy. The process begins innocently enough: a broadcast email hits inboxes across the country. “Bids needed for lawn maintenance or a roofing project and debris removal in multiple counties,” it says, or “Inspection coverage needed for HUD regions.” Field Service Technicians scramble to respond, gathering fuel estimates, disposal costs, and vendor pricing to submit a quote that reflects both the real costs of labor and the burden of inflation. Inspectors, meanwhile, run their own numbers—mileage, upload time, and turnaround deadlines—hoping that this bid might represent a genuine opportunity to secure long-term work. Yet, time after time, nothing follows. No contract. No award. No notice of non-selection. The bids vanish into the same silence that swallows RFIs, but this silence is even more cynical because it was never about work—it was about data.
Within the inner workings of the industry, these phantom bids are far from harmless. They serve as the economic backbone for pricing models that favor consolidation and internalization. By soliciting bids from hundreds of small vendors, Nationals effectively crowdsource the real-time cost of labor, materials, and logistics without paying a dime for that intelligence. Then, armed with that information, they craft internal work orders and assign them to W2 crews—employees whose wages are depressed by the very data gathered from the independent contractors they displaced. It is a closed loop of exploitation that uses labor’s knowledge against itself. For a preservation contractor with two trucks and three employees, the loss is not theoretical—it is measurable in fuel receipts and unpaid hours of estimating.
Inspectors are caught in an equally exploitative cycle. When they submit bids for occupancy checks or condition reports, they often receive the familiar refrain: “We’re evaluating submissions.” That evaluation, in most cases, never results in assignments. Instead, the collected data informs company-wide coverage maps, determining where existing W2 staff should be positioned to maximize efficiency. The small inspection firm’s analysis—its understanding of regional distances, density, and time-on-site—becomes stolen intellectual capital, folded quietly into internal planning documents. What was presented as a fair market competition is, in fact, unpaid consulting masquerading as procurement.
The ethical rot at the center of this practice lies in the asymmetry of risk. The Prime Vendor or Asset Manager expends nothing beyond the energy it takes to send an email—and with many firms that is generated by AI. The Field Service Technician, by contrast, invests time, energy, and operational cost. Every bid requires administrative preparation—insurance verification, subcontractor readiness, supply chain analysis. For small firms already battered by fluctuating fuel prices, the cost of simply participating in the illusion of competition becomes a drain that accelerates insolvency. Those hours could have been spent in the field, mowing grass, boarding windows, or hauling debris. Instead, they are consumed by desk work that never pays, all for the privilege of providing “free market intelligence” to the same corporate entities that will later use it to justify paying less.
In the government contracting space, RFIs and Sources Sought Notices operate under the same logic, only wrapped in bureaucratic justification. The government insists that these instruments help it gauge market capability, yet the result mirrors the private sector’s exploitation. Small businesses pour days into crafting detailed responses—organizational charts, past performance tables, and narrative statements of work—all without compensation. Then, as often happens, the agency issues a sole-source extension to an incumbent or quietly cancels the solicitation. The economic impact on small business is identical to that of the phantom bids sent out by the Nationals: lost time, lost labor, and a lost sense of faith in the system.
For Field Service Technicians and Inspectors, the distinction between these public and private exploitations is academic. The effect is the same: small, independent operators function as the unpaid R&D division of the industry. The Nationals use them to model real-world costs; the government uses them to check compliance boxes on small business participation. In both cases, the work product—pricing data, logistical insights, technical approaches—is extracted for free. This is not capitalism in its productive sense; it is parasitism. It is the systematic conversion of labor’s intellectual and operational capital into the raw material of corporate strategy.
The remedy, though obvious, remains elusive because it would require the industry to confront its own dependence on unpaid labor. The simplest reform would be to charge for bid responses. Just as architects and engineers bill for consultation and design time, preservation and inspection firms could establish a standard consulting fee for bid development. Even a nominal charge—say $150 for small bid packages—would signal that time and expertise have value. Government contracting officers could likewise implement micro-compensation for verified RFI responses, transforming what is now a one-sided extraction into a mutually beneficial exchange. Until that happens, the small business community must acknowledge that free participation in these processes subsidizes the very systems that suppress their growth.
There is also an urgent need for transparency. When a bid is collected but never awarded, the issuer should be required to disclose the outcome: Was the work performed internally? Was it assigned to another vendor? Did it lead to an award at all? The same applies to RFIs and Sources Sought—if an agency uses the collected data to justify a sole-source decision, that justification should be publicly documented. Without such transparency, the industry remains a hall of mirrors where appearance and intent are deliberately blurred to conceal exploitation.
The broader ethical question is whether small business owners should continue to accept this unpaid taxation on their labor. The Field Service Technician who sharpens mower blades at dawn and hauls debris at dusk cannot afford to spend days on paperwork that produces no revenue. The Inspector who drives county to county to verify occupancy cannot keep donating their strategic acumen to corporations that view them as disposable data sources. Each bid response and each RFI submission represents a tangible loss in the ledger of small business sustainability. If the industry refuses to compensate for that labor, then the industry should be denied its benefit.
Ultimately, this is not a question of opportunity but of fairness. The mortgage field services industry has built its administrative scaffolding upon the unpaid efforts of those it claims to serve. Whether it’s the illusion of federal inclusion through RFIs or the private sector’s internal bid games, the result is the same: small businesses are performing unpaid consulting under the guise of potential work. Until Field Service Technicians and Inspectors begin to charge for their expertise—or collectively refuse to participate in these charades—the exploitation will continue unabated. In a just system, knowledge has value, labor has worth, and information is not free. Until the industry recognizes that, every “bid opportunity” and every “RFI notice” remains what it truly is: the great bid grift, built upon the backs of those who can least afford to give any more.
