Are you wondering if the contractor you’re considering is legitimate? Are you concerned with someone trying to “fake it till they make it” on your home renovation? In this video, CRATE Founder + CEO Scott Monday offers 5 strategies guaranteed to expose a contractor that’s operating in a deceptive manner.
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Scott Monday is the founder and CEO of kitchenCRATE and bathCRATE. Follow him on Facebook or Linked-In.
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“Hey there, Scott Monday with Kitchen and Bath Crate. We are in one of the hottest remodel markets that we have ever seen, and in fact, if you’re a contractor right now and you specialize in home renovation and you’re not up to your eyeballs in work, you are doing something wrong. While that creates a very interesting market, a very busy market for contractors like us, it also creates a market that is really susceptible to new contractors coming on the scene that may be adopting the ‘fake it till they make it’ mindset and wanting to apply that to your home. So, I thought what I do today is share with you five different ways that you can verify your contractor and make sure that they are, in fact, who they say they are. So, let’s jump right into these five little tips and tricks you can use to protect yourself and your home.
Contractors Reviews
The first thing you want to do is you want to dive deeply into your contractor’s reviews. While it’s helpful to go to Google, Houzz.com, or Facebook and look at how many reviews a contractor has and their overall rating, what I want to encourage you to do is really dive into each and every review, especially from the past six months. What we’re seeing a lot of right now are contractors that are trying to change the services they offer. So, for example, maybe they’ve done a lot of flooring repair or fence repair or handyman-type services, and they’ve decided all of a sudden because of this market they want to be kitchen or bathroom remodelers. Go through their past reviews and make sure the people leaving reviews are actually reviewing services that you’re considering for your own home. It’s really important to get deep into the reviews and not just look at quantity or the overall star rating.
Contractor’s License
The second thing you want to investigate is licensing. I’m going to speak mostly toward California contractor licensing here because we’re located in California, but these principles can be applied all across the United States. When you’re investigating a contractor’s license, you want to do a couple of things. Number one, you want to look at the actual license number. In California, license numbers are generated sequentially, so literally license number one does exist, and it was issued more than a hundred years ago. Now, we are well into the seven digits, with well over one million California contractor licenses issued to date. What you want to do is stay away from contractors that have more recent numbers. Pretty much anything in the seven digits is going to be a contractor that got their license within the last few years. I don’t know about you, but I probably don’t want the new guy working on my own home.
Past Projects
Now, the third thing that you probably want to do is you want to look at their past projects on their website. Here’s a little trick to use. You want to go to the past projects, find a couple of past projects that catch your eye, and you want to actually right-click on those and save those files to your computer. Then go to this URL right here, it’s called a Google Image Search, and upload that image to the Google Image Search. What’s going to happen is Google will search all across the internet for that exact image. The reason you want to do this is it’s a surefire way to find companies that use stock photography on their website on past project pages. Protect yourself by doing that little Google image search, and I think you’ll find that perhaps on some of these websites, the same contractor from all across the US has worked on the same project. That’s a little suspect. Make sure that the images on the website are actually the work of the contractor.
Inflating Prices
The next thing that you want to watch out for is an inflated price structure. There are three reasons why contractors these days are using inflated prices, either listed on their website or given to you verbally or in person. Number one, what they want to do is they’re trying to anchor you high. Anchoring is this concept that they want you to think of a really high number first so when they come back with a slightly lower number, you think you’re getting a deal. Anchoring is a concept in sales that’s been around forever, and it’s just not the type of sales I think you really want to experience on your particular remodel project. Another reason that we’re seeing price inflation right now from contractors is they want people to think that if their prices are high, they’re kind of fancy, they’re kind of high-end, and that may not be the case. Just because a given automobile is really expensive doesn’t mean it’s necessarily better than one that’s not a luxury automobile. So make sure you keep that in mind as you consider these inflated prices. Some other contractors are throwing out.
The last reason that you might see inflated prices is because contractors simply aren’t taking the time or have the ability to produce detailed estimates. At Kitchen and Bath Crate, we’ve been working on our estimating system for 10 plus years, dialing it down to the dollar, and this is a system that we literally are working on on a weekly basis. Some other contractors don’t ascribe to that same type of detail, and so they inflate prices because quite frankly, it’s just a little bit easier than getting down to the bottom line when it comes to price.
Website Claims
Now the last thing that you want to do is you want to look at their website and kind of make sure that the numbers they claim pass the sniff test. What I mean by that is if you have a contractor that’s been around for 15 or 18 months and on their website, they claim 450 or 500 projects completed, quickly do the math in your head. Do you really think they do 30 remodels a month? That is an astronomical number, and there’s no way that a claim like that is true. Just make sure the numbers and claims they have on their website and in their marketing literature are legitimate and make sense to you.
So there you go, those are five different ways that you can protect yourself on your project during this crazy remodeling economy where a lot of different companies are definitely getting into services above their head. If you’d like to talk with us about your project, call us at 888-995-7996 or visit kbcrate.com where you’re going to see literally 500 plus past projects, real past projects profiled on our website. You may enjoy taking a look at those. Thanks so much for watching.”
