Ekka's spot on (from my experience) with the relationship of council and developers and trees that have been deemed valuable therefore must be preserved. Unfortunately the quess was not spot on (I wish) now you have to remember that this is the first time this method of transplant has been done outside of Brisbane metropolitan area, so everyone was a bit gun shy plus the developer Honeycombes had no experience in contracting tree transplants. I'm not going to give you the exact price mainly because I work for someone else and that's Steve's business but he and I wish we'd put $120K on it. We didn't loose money on the job.
That also answers the question as to whether this is a good money earner, no its not, unless your business is set up to undertake large transplants. the steel work, manufacturing costs, plant equipment hire costs alone crucify you. If anything goes pear shaped you can have a $400/hr machine sitting there waiting for half a day, and if you aren't mates with the company and get instant standby rates you are royally screwed. try adjusting the price halfway through the job when its taken months to negotiate the contract...
good luck.
However if you can afford to buy the steel, and the other materials burlap(hessian) straps, slings and have friends that are boiler makers and good relations with large plant machinery companies then yes you could make good money from moving big trees, no doubt about it and I know people that do alright from the transplants they do......
but bear in mind they can never recover the 100s of hrs of phone calls paperwork prep negotiations and running back and forwards envolved in getting the jobs done let alone the hours of worry about everything possible that can go wrong, nor the hours of post transplant care that you put in above the contracted hours because you actually care about the trees. If you put those costs in the quote...well you'd never get any jobs!!
Neither tree transplant would have been possible without reaaly great help support advice and encouragement from Adam Tom, and Daniel Oaten both in Brisbane.
Number of trees moved (including trees moved before working with Steve)...4, success rate 100%, please realise in the past I was envovled at the ground level, shovelling and getting dirty like the poor guy cleaning out under the pipes for us, over time I have gradually become more responsible for how things progress, these are the first trees that with Steve I have been responsible for what happens.
Total hours including 1st root prune crickey thats a hard one but my estimate up to today, I fed the soil (not the tree!) today 106hrs, three of us in the company estimate 300hrs roughly
JayD, I'd like to chase up those charts because the next tree will be more like 45/50T and I don't want to bend another beam!.