The benefits of using licensed contractors was the main feature of Angies List magazine this month. When we finished out our basement a few years ago price was the primary factor for which contractors we chose.  We narrowed it down to several contractors that had been recommended and picked the one with the lowest price, with no regard to which were licensed.

Contractor Pricing and Licenses

Looking back on our approach of going with the lowest price, it may be that the contractors we hired weren’t licensed.  The Angies List article looked at the variety of license fees required across cities and states and gave an example of one company in Cincinnati that pays around $30,000 a year to meet the requirements.

When companies spend that much on fees they often pass part of it on to their customers.  However, if a company isn’t licensed then they won’t pay the fees and can afford to offer the work for a lower price. The article suggested that you ask for proof of a license prior to hiring a contractor, the ones they spoke with said that customers rarely to see their license.

Liability Insurance

One of the main reasons the article recommends checking for a license is that typically in order to get a license a contractor will have to show proof of insurance. Their liability insurance should cover property damage and bodily injury caused by work.  However if they don’t have insurance and they get injured you could potentially have to pay for it if your homeowner’s insurance doesn’t cover it all.

Quality of Work

Of course the other reason to find a licensed contractor is that it’s supposed to indicate they’ve been through the proper training and testing and know what they’re doing.  Based on the range of local rules and enforcement policies it sounds as though the competence reflected by the license may vary depending on where you live. 

Angies List called me up yesterday to follow up on the contractors that I’d been searching for.  When you signup for Angies List you set in your profile what contractors you’re looking to hire and they wanted to get my feedback on the company that I’d worked with.  What kind of experience I had, was I pleased with the service, etc.

I didn’t know Angies List staff followed up with members to capture their feedback on contractors but I’m glad they do.  I can see how people that have bad experiences with a contractor might be quick to lead negative comments but someone that had a good experience might just get busy and forget to rate their provider after the work is done.  Since the main value of the service is to capture input from all it’s members, I think it’s great that they follow up with us.

Contractor Searches

They also asked questions about the different aspects of membership that I was using and I learned of some features I wasn’t aware of.  In my Angies List review I wrote mainly about the features of the website for searching and screening the list of local contractors.  It turns out members can also just call into the service and ask for information on a certain type of provider and the operator will search the feedback database and make some suggestions for you. 

I’ve never used this feature before but I suppose it could come in handy if you were away from your computer and needed quick information about a company.  Maybe if you were out and about and had car trouble and wanted to lookup a car repair company before having them work on your vehicle. You can also email in the type of contractor you’re looking for and Angies List will respond with some of the best, highly rated matches from their member database.

Angies List Magazine

They also asked for feedback about the magazine, which I have been getting and reading.  It’s a monthly magazine that you get with your subscription that I’ve browsed through each month.  It has a lot of coupons from local contractors, which I haven’t made use of yet, but also a few articles on consumer services. 

One of the good tips I picked up was from an article that looked at companies that will fix your broken or damaged iPod, iPhone, or Zune.  I guess I didn’t realize these type of companies existed, it makes sense that they do.  I figured you had to either work with the manufacturer or buy a new one, these gadget repair companies could be a better alternative.

I mentioned the gadget repair article to one of my co-workers and we got to talking about the Angies List magazine and membership.  He had had some water coming into his basement and was going to checkout the service to research some companies that could help him out.  I let him know he should use an Angies List promotion code if he was going to try it out, and get a discount on the service.

Angies List reviews of local contractors are written by consumers who share their positive and negative experiences on a range of home improvement services.  Angie’s List members submit ratings of contractors they’ve worked with; such as plumbers, electricians, painters, and roofers.

Angies List Trial

I first tried out Angies List when a co-worker let me login to his account and search for local painters in our area.  I had Angies List coupon codes but couldn’t find one that offered a free trial so he volunteered to let me test it out using his account.  My first step was to find painters simply by searching on the category “Painting – Exterior” and choosing painters in a 10 miles radius, as shown in the image below.  As you can see, the other search options are to look for a keyword or to search on a company’s name.

Contractor Ratings

There were 17 painters listed in the results, about half had good reviews.  Angies List has members use a rating scale of A-F; there were two F’s, one D, two C’s, four B’s, and 8 A’s.  Obviously the contractors with good ratings were the ones I wanted to research but first I was curious to see why some of them had been rated poorly.

A contractor’s overall score is made up of ratings on price, quality, responsiveness, punctuality, and professionalism.  Here’s the breakdown of one person who rated a local painter a C.  People also leave  comments explaining their ratings, this one was pretty brief but pretty much sums it up “PAINT JOB TOOK TWO WEEKS LONGER TO COMPLETE THAN ORIGINALLY PROMISED”. 

Some of the ones that rated the painter as F or D had much longer explanations.  That seemed to be the case of the majority of reviews, people that were satisfied left a brief summary but people that were unhappy went into great detail describing step by step what happened and why they were so angry.

Then I moved onto some of the companies that were rated for good service.  The interface on Angies List shows a snapshot of the latest customer reviews; the score, the date, and a blurb of the review, you can see an example below.

Reading through the feedback made me realize that the best way to use Angies List is as a screening tool.

Every person’s experince is different and I shouldn’t choose or rule out a contractor based soley on one review.

For example, the D rating you see in the screenshot was given because someone called the company for a bid for work and never got a response.

Of course, if it was a trend and lots of people were reporting the same thing you might worry but a D rating from one person that didn’t get an estimate shouldn’t rule them out. Reading through the reviews kind of reminded me of the customers I worked with on eBay.  The majority of people are fair and resonable but occassionally you run into an irrational customer with unreasonable expectations that wants to tell the whole world how bad you are even if it was just based on a misunderstanding .

Angies List Signup

After testing out the service I decided it would be worth my money so I signed up for Angies List. It’s only a two step process, first you fill out the screen below that creates your account login and let’s them know what local market you’ll be searching for contractor reviews in.

Then you enter in the age of your home and your address.  At first I wondered why they needed my address but after reading through the site I saw as part of the membership you receive a monthly Angies List magazine with home improvement and remodeling tips so they need it to deliver the magazine. 

Membership Options

Although there is no free trial for Angies List just to test it out, they do have a monthly option that’s only $4.50. I probably would have gone with that option just to try out the site but since my co-worker let me mess around with it under his login I knew what the site was all about and felt like I’d get enough value out of a longer term. The annual option gives you a 35% discount so that was the best one for me. Plus, they offer a 110% money back guarantee for the annual option if you’re not satisfied with the service. Angies List does offer an even bigger discount for terms of two, three, or four years but I wasn’t sure if I’d need it for that long, we’ll see how much use we get out of it the first year.

 

They do charge a one time signup fee to become a member but there are promo codes for Angies List that will waive the fee for you.

Angies List Discounts

After I logged in and looked around some more I ran across another aspect that I had overlooked, a lot of the contractors offer a small discount if you mentioned you found them via Angies List. It wasn’t anything major, maybe 5-10% off your bill but I suppose if it’s a big job that could add up.

Another thing I hadn’t noticed was the Discounts and Perks section on the site that offers coupons for deals on a variety of items. A lot of them I wouldn’t use but there were a few like discounts on travel sites such as Orbitz, Delta, Holiday Inn, and Southwest that might be useful. Some of the discounts were pretty sizable, like the 50% off of a subscription to Experian’s Triple Advantage Credit Monitoring service or 50% off newspaper subscriptions. Another one that was interesting was the ability to buy discounted movie tickets for local theaters, the only bad thing is that they mail you the tickets so you’d have to plan that out in advance. Anyhow, the whole point of the site is to find good contractors but I guess they offer these discounts to help members make sure they get their money’s worth.

Angies List Review

Overall, it seems like a good screening service to help find contractors in your area that have a history of quality work and customer satisfaction. I don’t think Angies List would be useful for people that don’t live in or near big metropolitan areas. The real value of the service is getting feedback from other consumers on a variety of contractors in your area. If there aren’t enough people in your town that use the service then there wouldn’t be many reviews and a membership wouldn’t be as effective.

However, if you live in or around a larger city I think it can be a useful service. If you decide to try it out, just make sure you use a promo code so you can wave the signup fee.

Angies List founder, Angie Hicks, offered some tips recently on an ABC station on hiring a contractor to do work on your home.  According to polls taken by Angie’s List members, homeowners are spending more on home improvement than in recent years. A contractor interviewed on the news segment concurred that a lot of people are choosing to remodel their homes instead of buying or building new homes due to the tough real estate market.

Lower Prices for Home Improvement?

The same poll on Angies List indicated that due to the recession, a lot of members have found contractors dropping their prices by at least 10% in order to get the work. Despite the discounts, remodeling your house isn’t cheap so the advice Angie gives is that you typically need to stay in your home for a few years to recoup the cost of the job. She re-iterated the advice I’ve heard before that work on kitchens and bathrooms often brings the best return on investment.

To help with the cost of the job she suggests getting several estimates and negotiating with the contractors to see who can offer the best price.

Quality of Work

Of course, it’s not all about the price, the quality of the work is just as important.  To find someone who will do a good job, Angie recommends using a contractor you found on a referral, whether through friends or family or via a service like Angies List.

I think this is one of her best pieces of advice.  We have a friend who got some really low price quotes from a contractor who came to her door offering to do some work.  Of course she was excited due to the low cost but to me it was a red flag to do some further investigation. 

If the price seems too good to be true it pays to dig deeper and find out the reason for good deal.  It could be that the contractor is really hurting for work, however, it could also be that they do a horrible job and can only compete on price. 

I know a guy that runs a local concrete business and he says about 30–40% of the work he does is fixing the mistakes of other contractors.

Common Sense Hiring Tips

The tips the news segment offered are pretty common sense.  Double check that the contractor is licensed and insured and ask for references of other work they’ve done. Before you pay any money or have them start on a job get a contract with all of the work spelled out. 

Another good reason to research a contractor, especially in a bad economy, is that you don’t want to have them start on a project and then have them go out of business on you part way through.  Apparently Angies List offers a service called ContractorCheck in partnership with Experian that allows it’s members to check the credit of businesses and contractors before hiring them.

When I researched joining the service I discovered you can use Angies List promo codes to save money on membership if you want to signup and try it out.  Right now you can use the promo code of HOMEWORK to save $20.