Cost estimator pricing & recommendations - townhomes

[Richard W.]

I'm building (as developer, hiring a GC) five townhomes in Houston. Until now I've been building duplexes in Dallas. I have a decent set of cost data from those builds, but all the material and labor cost inflation/volatility of the last two years make it an imperfect calculation for price checking my GC's latest bid for the townhomes. Rather than ask another GC to bid (knowing that I will almost certainly not use them), I'm instead looking to pay for a professional building cost estimator. Two questions:

1) One cost estimator has proposed a $4k fee to do this work. Seems higher than I was expecting. Do people agree?

2) Do you have any recommendations for other cost estimators I could ask?

Thanks in advance for the help