When searching for a contractor, I always urge potential customers to check various sources instead of relying on one website. Besides looking through the usual, Google, Yelp, Angie’s List, etc., I also suggest Googling a company’s owner to see if there’s anything you can find on them, but also not being afraid of using the second and third pages on search engines to see things that might have been intentionally buried. What you also have to consider when reading reviews, is how tightly some reviews are posted after bad ones. For instance, some companies may have four or five good reviews which were posted months ago and then recently got a set of two or three bad reviews. Within days they’ll have a couple of new good reviews which sound a lot alike trying to push the bad reviews down the chain a bit. Another tactic is a little more extreme, but some companies have had five to eight reviews compiled in the last several years and a couple of them may be bad. Then out of no where, they’ll have twenty, thirty and even up sixty new reviews all within the last three months explaining how great the company is while all sounding pretty much the same. They’ll use the same sentences like, “He always wore booties in my house,” or “they fixed the problem within two hours.” Sure if you provide a service that’s specific some of your reviews will have similar compliments, but when you read ten reviews that all sound alike, and all are constructed within three sentences and use exclamations in the same fashion, then you know there may be a problem. As I always remind everyone, hiring a contractor is a part time partnership and you’re allowing someone in your home and into your lives for a brief time, so you’re due diligence is what separates that from being a good or bad experience.
