How to Find a Good Contractor: Start Here

This Guide Will Change How You Manage Your Home

Busy work. That’s what finding a good home service provider feels like. Sifting through reviews, guessing if they’ll do a good job, or even call you back. But when you find a great contractor, who does everything perfectly - it almost makes you think the juice was worth the squeeze

The bad news: the way HOMR solved this problem isn’t practical for most homeowners. It’s extremely involved and labor-intensive. Here’s the simplified version: 

“Call up 500 of your neighbors, ask them for reviews on the last ten home services they bought. Now pick the best contractors from that list.” That may be too much work for the average person, but most homeowners can use this guide to save time.

If you’re confused: we run a home service concierge. HOMR is an end-to-end platform for homeowners to buy things like lawn care, plumbing repairs, and home remodels. We’ve worked with and paid 243 DFW home contractors. We’ve screened 500+.

We get recommendations for new service partners from all over the place, likely the same places you do:

• Members of our concierge service
• Trucks we see while going to job sites
• Online directories like Google and NextDoor
• Recommendations from service partners in our network

Just getting names isn’t enough because everyone uses different standards of quality. One neighbor might like a plumber because they responded quickly. Another might love a plumber that solved their niche problem, despite being hard to get a hold of. 

So we developed a 6-step process to cut through the noise and rank the best contractors and home service providers for our members.

How to Find a Good Contractor in 6 Steps

We want to find contractors that almost any homeowner would love. And each step of our process was built to solve a specific problem we ran into while picking winning home service contractors. 

Here’s the overview of what we do:

1. Screen
2. Interview
3. Insurance and Licenses
4. Test Jobs
5. Random Quality Checks
6. Member Satisfaction

Our goal is to get details on the things our home owners care about most.

1. Are they good communicators? - do they respond when you have a new job for them, and when you have a problem.

2. Are they reliable? Home services are hard: jobs become more complex without warning, plus traffic in a big city is always volatile. At the end of the day: do they get the job done and keep their promises? 

3. Do they actually get the problem fixed?  Do they deliver a good final work product? 

4. Do they bill quickly, and fairly? 

5. Do they stand behind their work with a warranty? 

Our process is built to find people that do those things the right way. 

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Already like what we do? Talk to us about managing your home services.

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Step 1 - Screening

When HOMR started, we did what most homeowners do: look for contractors with good reviews. Problems hit right away - big companies had lots of reviews but were too expensive. Some great companies only had 1 or 2 reviews. There's both too much data, and not enough substance to give anyone a thumbs up.

We learned one important lesson from this though: disqualify a low-quality contractor before you even talk to them. 

Reviews and the Better Business Bureau are the best way to do this.

A company’s reputation may be spread out across dozens of online profiles: Angi, Yelp, Google (of course), and even places like Thumbtack. HOMR looks at all online profiles available. If you’re crunched for time and want the ‘best’ profile, just use the one with the most reviews. That often lines up with where providers spend the most time. 

There’s also an emerging issue: companies heavily “game” the review system. As they’ve become the de facto indicator of quality, we have seen an increase in “review farming.” We know of one local moving company that gives customers $50 cash to write a review after their move. Yikes!

We still use this method to screen out bad partners - an unkempt online reputation is a disqualifier for HOMR. Our research team also screens for fake reviews and review farming.

HOMR Profiles: Screen All Contractor Reviews in One Place

We created HOMR Profiles as a place for homeowners to screen and read all contractor reviews on one easy-to-find page. 

We wanted to be able to see a home service company’s entire online reputation in one place, and are beginning to roll this tool out for everyone on the web!

Step 2 - Interview

Not every lawn care company warranties their plants. Or installs sod. Or trims hedges. You typically don’t find out services offered, and annoying quirks by reading reviews – and it’s often hard to find on contractor websites (if they have one). You find that out by talking to them.

We personally interview every service partner on our platform to solve this problem. 

Lawn care, plumbing, electrical – every industry gets their own set of questions. You find out what’s important to ask after completing 25,000 services.

For example, here’s a few sod questions we ask lawn care companies: 

• “What does a pallet of St. Augustine sod cost?”
• “How long do homeowners need to water it for you to warranty the sod?” 
• “How long does your sod warranty last?”

You don’t need to be a subject matter expert on 25 different home services. You can still screen someone with good, basic questions.‍

Try asking some of these the next time you call a plumber: 

• How do you handle customer service issues?
• What are your workmanship, labor, and product warranties?
• Do you use subs or in-house employees?
• How long have you worked with them?
• How much experience do your installers (the people DOING THE WORK) have? 

Want to see the process in action? Our How It Works page is what you’re looking for.

Step 3 - Insurance and Licenses

One of our home owners had a contractor walk off their remodel halfway through. (This was before they joined HOMR) Against all odds the contractor had an insurance policy, and their Insurance covered the repairs to finish the project.

Insurance doesn’t just cover damage - it also covers injuries to you and people on your property during the job.  Most providers will carry a $1MM policy. If you have a large home, these limits may need to be higher due to your home’s value.

HOMR requires all of our partners to carry insurance and any licenses required by their trade. They submit them as part of their application process before we verify them.

Beware: not everyone who claims to have insurance actually does. A scam we’ve run into from time to time is a canceled certificate of insurance. The company will purchase an insurance policy, and generate the certificate of insurance (COI). After they download this PDF, they cancel the policy and only pay for a day’s worth of insurance. These documents appear valid because the coverage date is 6 months in the future. 

Always call an insurance company to verify that a COI is valid.

Licenses, on the other hand, act as guarantees on workmanship. The state tells you that the service provider has a minimum level of skill. They’re also a general guarantee of minimum quality standards being upheld. 

Licenses work hand-in-hand with permits; telling a city (and the property owner) which license holder did work on a property.

Most technical trades require licenses in the state of Texas:

• Plumbing
• HVAC
• Irrigation
• Electrical
• Mold/Lead Assessment

Don’t just ask for licenses: just like with insurance, you need to check and see if it’s current. 

In Texas, you can use the Texas Department of Licensing and Regulation License Lookup Tool. Most other states have similar systems you can use to verify licensing.

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Need your contractor’s license and insurance checked? We do that.

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Step 4 - Test Jobs

You ever wish you could “date” an HVAC repair company before you “marry” them with a full system replacement? 

HOMR’s staff doesn’t just sit behind a screen and rank companies. We actively manage and schedule hundreds of jobs a week. We don’t risk complex projects with unproven providers. 

New providers are given what we internally call a “test” job. HOMR test jobs have 4 key factors:

1. A small scope of work - New providers are given low stakes to show how they handle jobs - everything from communication to billing
2. A representative project - Plumbers will claim they can do a cast iron replacement when 80% of their work is water heater replacements. We find it’s best to ask a partner what they do best as an example of their work.
3. Performed on a HOMR team member’s house - When possible, we like to test new providers on our own house on our own dime to make sure it’s work we could live with
4. An on-site review - Are employees uniformed (not a deal breaker)? Polite (definitely a deal breaker)? Clean and respectful of the property? 

If you have the time and the money - always start a provider with a low-stakes job. We find that the way contractors handle small jobs mirrors how they handle large jobs. 

Step 5 - Random Quality Checks

Avoid getting “love bombed” by your contractor. After 500 interviews, a small (but noticeable) number of home services companies were great up until they started working on a member’s house. 

HOMR’s team performs random quality checks every week. We go to our members’ jobs and provide contractors with feedback about their techs and operators. 

This helps them improve and deliver high quality service all the time — not just at the beginning of your project.

Most homeowners don’t get the advantage of a “test-drive” before they start working with a new contractor. Here are 2 things you can do instead: 

1. Give brief, but thorough feedback throughout a job. 
2. Call out things that you like and dislike. This drastically increases your chances of being happy at the end of the job. 

If you do this, make sure to communicate feedback in the right direction. On jobs with a general contractor (GC), we don’t recommend giving feedback to the tradesman on-site. Deal with the GC directly - preferably in a written form like text-message or email.

For single trades, chat with your technician and communicate what you want: things like taking off their shoes in the house, or if you have sleeping children. 

A regular quality check winner: Aubrey Plumbing routinely scores well in HOMR’s random quality checks. .

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Step 6 - Member Satisfaction

Services are hard because you don’t know if the work is good until the end of the job. 

“Are you 100% satisfied with the work performed?”‍

We began asking this question at the end of every job. What we wanted to know was whether we should keep working with that home service provider. HOMR could easily become a review platform, but we didn’t like the idea of subjective reviews clouding what should be an objective decision. 

Additionally, we track if the member has a punch list at the end of the job. As it turns out, the partners with the fewest punch list requests always scored the best on satisfaction.

While these are our two most important contractor satisfaction metrics, we also track other stats:

• On time percentage
• Number of change orders
• Quote submission time

And other key metrics to ensure that customers are consistently getting great results on their jobs. 

Limitations - Why This Isn’t Foolproof

We are home service nerds: we like doing this work because it benefits our members and saves them time. The time we invest works for us because we may end up working with a new partner for years and send them hundreds of jobs. 

While our method is very thorough, it takes a lot of time. Onboarding and vetting one partner can take several hours to a few days. This isn’t always practical for homeowners, especially if they have an urgent request like HVAC repairs, or a plumbing leak. 

Look at the trade-off between speed & certainty. Incorporate elements of this checklist into your “home management tool belt” where it makes sense.

If you love our contractor vetting process but don’t have time to do it yourself, consider HOMR as your home service concierge.