Why Use Angie's List?
By Editor, March 2, 2012
Why should you check
Angie's List before picking a home
improvement contractor? Here's why I think it's
important.
I have managed a factory with three shifts full
of people, and I have managed rehabs of
properties headed for resale and the rental
market. You would think it would be much harder
to manage sixty factory workers than one
residential contractor, but you would be dead
wrong. I have done some rehabs using contractors
and some using handymen, and in all of those
cases is was much harder to manage that one
rehab, (even though there were never more than
five people working on a house at once, with a
single contact person), than it was a factory
with sixty employees.
There are six main types of problems that
contractors will give you:
 1.
They won't show up to do the job. Most
homeowners are naive enough to think that this
problem will totally disappear if they simply
withhold the last 10% of payment until after the
job is complete. Nothing could be further from
the truth. First of all, that is not a big
enough percentage to withhold. If a contractor
has a choice between picking up a 40% down
payment on another job, and collecting a 10%
payment from you, guess which trip he will be
more motivated to make. Secondly, some
contractors act in a totally irrational way.
Even if yours is the only money he could
possibly pick up on a particular day, he may not
show up.
2. They show up but they don't get anything
done. Obviously this tends to happen most often
when you are paying a handyman by the hour
(which is why you are often better paying by the
job or at least putting a cap on the hours for a
particular group of jobs). However it sometimes
happens even when you pay them by the job.
3. Financial irresponsibility. You are paying
your contractor, but he has not paid his
employees. They are coming directly to you,
saying they will not show up tomorrow if you
don't give them some money. Think it can't
happen to you? It happened to me, and I had
already rehabbed five other houses. If the
contractor has sub-contractors you want to be
especially careful that you get release of lien
forms signed by all of them, so that they don't
end up placing a lien on your home. If you skip
this step you can end up paying twice for your
home repair project. In many states you not only
have to be concerned with the sub-contractors,
but with any supplier who can prove their goods
were used on your home. You need to make sure
that your contractor's suppliers have been paid.
Another thing to watch out for is whether your
contractor is keeping all their insurance paid
up. You never want to end up in a situation
where you have to pay out money to cover your
contractor's mistakes.
4. Alcohol abuse. You want to make sure that you
can cancel your contract if your contractor
shows up drunk, or prohibit him from using any
employee that shows up drunk to work on your
home. Depending on whether your home is occupied
at the time of repair, you will also want to
come to an understanding with your contractor,
about loud radios, smoking and daily cleanup.
One of my contractors wanted to save on the cost
of a dumpster. He would just dump the demolition
debris in front of the house and accumulate it,
planning to haul it away months later. He felt
his building permit allowed him to do this. The
city code enforcement officials did not agree.
5. Using shoddy workers or sub-contractors If
your contractor's plumber has a habit of failing
inspections time after time, the building
inspector may get fed up with him and lower the
boom, making him redo all kinds of things. The
one who will get hurt the most by this is not
the plumber but you. Time is money, whether it
means you have to rent a house while you are
waiting for yours to be finished, or whether it
means you can't get your profit from selling or
renting out a rehab.
6. Not following directions. There is an orange
house in St Petersburg. I did not tell them to
paint it that color. Enough said!
When you see how many ways there are that a
contractor or handyman can disappoint you, you
will appreciate the need of checking references
carefully on a service like
Angie's List. Ask a contractor for
references and he will give you the ones from
the jobs that went smoothly, but look on Angie's
list and you should get a much more
representative sampling of the quality of his
work.
Disclosure: Compensated
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