Matching the repair method to the damage

Check the unit that comes before the number. This site carries three GTA asphalt repair rates: per pothole, per linear foot and per square foot. All three are published by Zusashi Maintenance, and each unit is tied to a different method. The job assumed for a bid priced per square foot is not the same as the job assumed for one priced per pothole.

Since 2007, Zusashi Maintenance has served Markham and the GTA; its published prices include commercial parking lot pothole repair at $100 to $500 per pothole, hot-rubberized crack sealing at $1 to $3 per linear foot, and general commercial asphalt patching at $2 to $5 per square foot. Those three figures occupy separate rows on one contractor's price page, and no two use the same unit. In this market, commercial repair is priced by the unit of the item being fixed, and the item changes from row to row.

A count tallies separate failures. A linear foot measures the length of something that runs. A square foot measures an area that will be cut out and replaced. The unit on the bid therefore carries a decision the contractor already made about your lot before any dollar figure was written. That decision is the part worth checking, because a lower price negotiated inside the wrong method still buys the wrong repair.

When a price is quoted per pothole, someone walked the lot and tallied each hole. That approach treats every defect as a separate problem, surrounded by intact pavement, and the $100 to $500 spread Zusashi Maintenance gives for that unit comes from differences in size and depth. If the proposal includes a pothole count while your own inspection turned up long cracks running along the drive aisles, the two accounts of the lot disagree, and you should clear up that difference before settling the price.

Charging by the linear foot means the contractor measured cracking instead of counting each crack. Zusashi Maintenance prices hot-rubberized crack sealing at $1 to $3 per linear foot as a treatment that fills and seals a route water is already taking through the surface. A per-square-foot price means the contractor moved from treating separate failures to treating an area: general commercial patching at $2 to $5 per square foot, again from Zusashi Maintenance, removes and replaces a portion of the surface as one unit. That is a larger intervention than either of the other two, and a bid should state the rate together with the area it covers.

In their current form, two bids priced in different units are not comparable. You cannot set Zusashi Maintenance's $100 to $500 per pothole next to its own $2 to $5 per square foot until you know the surface area each of those potholes represents and how much of the lot the patch covers. To correct this, require a quantity take-off on every bid: the count of potholes, the linear feet of crack, and the square feet of continuous failure. Ask each bidder for those quantities in writing, then read the rates against them.

The take-off also reveals the part of a repair price that is unrelated to the repair itself. Because crew mobilization is the same either way, Zusashi Maintenance's own guidance notes that a single small patch prices worse per square foot than the same area inside a larger scope; that same logic also leads it to advise bundling multiple potholes into a single visit. A bid that carries one small quantity spreads a fixed cost thinly. That is a reason to ask what else on the lot could be done during the same trip. Negotiating the rate down does not affect it.

One further caution concerns the rates themselves. For GTA asphalt repair, this site's pricing comes from only two independent sources that publish their own numbers, Zusashi Maintenance and Action Home Services, and no others. Otherwise, published repair pricing for this market comes mainly from cost-aggregator pages with no named author and no stated method, and the site does not carry those pages. Two sources are enough to check a bid and not enough to settle one, so treat every figure here as a check, not a target. The asphalt repair cost guide provides the full set.

All methods described above start from the assumption that the surface has failed and the base underneath is sound. Once the damage is widespread enough that patching would cover a large share of the lot, the comparison shifts, since a single new layer over the whole area competes with a series of separate patches. Each patch carries its own mobilization cost and leaves a seam. The Paving Company, a Toronto and GTA contractor, quotes $3 to $7 per square foot for its own overlay work on an existing surface, with pricing applied to the whole area rather than the damaged part.

The fairness of that comparison comes down to the milling line item. Before an overlay is installed, contractors often grind off the old surface so the new layer sits flush with curbs, catch basins and door thresholds; Sure-Seal Pavement Maintenance charges $0.75 to $1.25 per square foot for cold milling, in addition to the overlay price. Confirm that a resurfacing bid includes cold milling. Also check the state of the base, because an overlay is only suitable over a structurally sound one. If the granular base has failed or water has undermined the subgrade, the correct approach is full-depth reconstruction, which is scoped and priced differently again. The resurfacing cost guide lists those rates.

Sealcoating is often sold next to repair work, and the two are regularly confused. Sealcoating is a maintenance treatment. It slows oxidation and stops water, oil, and salt from breaking down the asphalt underneath, while leaving structural problems, cracks, and potholes exactly where they were. Zusashi Maintenance charges commercial sealcoating at $0.20 to $0.40 per square foot for the two-coat application the company describes, and prices hot rubberized crack fill separately at $1 to $3 per linear foot. That separate pricing is itself a sign that the two are distinct scopes on the same invoice.

Confirm the coat count on a sealcoating quote. Zusashi Maintenance sets its rate for a two-coat application, so a one-coat quote compared with it can look lower without costing less for the same work. Order matters too: crack sealing is normally quoted and done before the coating, because applying sealer over an open crack does not close it. The sealcoating category and the sealcoating cost guide cover that scope separately.

The index contains 376 companies across nine categories, and because a single company can appear in more than one, the category totals overlap. The asphalt repair category has 87 companies. Sealcoating has 96, asphalt paving has 181, and parking lot paving has 92. When Google Maps labels the same records, it leans toward general trades rather than specialists: 145 records carry the paving contractor label, 99 carry asphalt contractor, compared with 43 carrying excavating contractor and 29 carrying line marking service. A company that appears under asphalt repair may be a paving contractor that also patches, which gives another reason to pay attention to the unit shown on its bid.

Durability is outside what the index can check. It includes no warranty terms, no job-completion data and no years-in-business figure for any company, so nothing here can confirm a claim that one method outlasts another on a given lot. The 87 records for this category sit on the asphalt repair page, with rating and review count shown when the source listed those figures. Of the 376 companies in the index, 352 have a rating, and across those 352 rated companies the average is 4.46.