Has anyone used this. I seem to have got some ridiculously low quotes one offered. £100 to swap a toilet and basin for vanity unit and concleaded. Then swap radiator for towel radiator would involve draining down the system.
My builder quotes
- Thread starter Fredstudio
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And worse they take a cut, or the traders pay a fee to see the lead.
Best avoided, especially check a con man
Best avoided, especially check a con man
They just want to come and start the job then say it's alot more? Is a ridiculously cheap price would be a few days work I'd imagine
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I've tried to use it...
As a tradesman, looking to fill in short-notice capacity in my scheduled diary.
As a gas safe heating engineer, plumber and installer.
You know that the £100 quoted is ridiculous!
That's less than my 1st hour on a call out... and I attend with all the qualifications, experience, knowledge, insurance and equipment you'd expect a professional tradesman to possess (and the overheads that come with this).
It's not possible to use it as a professional tool.
I have had a few decent jobs and customers from it, since joining in late 2023, but 95% of the leads I've "expressed an interest" in, have been "shortlisted" for, and have paid a "shortlist fee" for, have been a waste of time and money - and quite often extremely unpleasant.
There are 'cowboy customers' as well as 'cowboy builders' and this platform is full of both.
There are also genuine customers who are innocently clueless and matching these with a decent tradesperson is pure luck on the platform.
From my POV, the biggest issue is the vagueness of the job descriptions... Mybuilder could do much more to guide job posters through a prompted script, to get as much information across, as possible... Brand names, photos at various fields of view, expected lead times, site conditions etc. But they don't.
Trades can ask questions once they have 'expressed an interest', but the job poster has to 'shortlist' them, in order to be able to provide answers, many of which, would make further negotiations genuinely unfeasible... So, a fee raised and money wasted for the trader.
It could be so much better and still as profitable IMO, for Mybuilder.
I could go on.
Sorry for the long post.
Just wanted to put things across, from a tradie's POV.
completely agree
These sites just operate for lead generation, they want the tradesman to pay for cr@p leads, often the same lead is sent to a number of tradesmen so the only way to win a job is by underpricing.
I once used Quotatis for lead generation for timber conservatories, they would make you pay for absolute rubbish leads, I did do a few jobs with them, but thats after filtering out a few hundred cr@p leads
The idea is good, but the result is these sites attract cowboy customers and cowboy tradesmen.
Think of the old way...
I have a number of merchants I use.
They would all happily send a customer my way "if" they thought the customer was genuine and not a time waster.
Likewise, they would only recommend a trusted and respected tradesman to a customer who asked.
They would not want any 'comeback' from either party.
And they do this without a fee.
I have no issue with the fee, but introduce some standards and criteria for both parties!
Not just the job poster, who is "generating" the fee and making the profit for mybuilder, at the expense of the trader!
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As a user of tradesmen rather than a tradesman looking for work, any mention of My Builder or Check a trade etc. and I knock them off the list, my thoughts are why would a good tradesman need to sites? If they need the sites to get work, either just starting or useless. I will not take the chance.
She wot scowls at me when I stumble through the door in the evening once made the mistake of using My Builder.
A guy called Toby from Hatfield came along to do some fairly basic work. She mentioned that she wanted to re-do the downstairs bathroom. He took approximately £3k for the materials. I am guessing that he stuck it up his nose.
She never saw him or the money again. She did however receive threatening messages after she asked her bank to claw the money back- they did freeze the transfer, but eventually let him have it.
I only discovered what was going on at the eleventh hour. I could see that he had a string of outstanding CCJs from previous customers. Whenever the bailiffs turn up, his parents say that he doesn't live there.
I searched through the internet and found various social media accounts. His family like horse drawn caravans and his mum makes and sells fake Gucci/etc labels through Facebook. 'Nuf said...
Personally, I feel sorry for the respectable tradesmen on those kind of platforms. They do however have an air of "race to the bottom". Professionals such as @dilalio are competing with the likes of Toby and potential customers often want the job done as cheaply as possible- not properly, just cheaply.
A guy called Toby from Hatfield came along to do some fairly basic work. She mentioned that she wanted to re-do the downstairs bathroom. He took approximately £3k for the materials. I am guessing that he stuck it up his nose.
She never saw him or the money again. She did however receive threatening messages after she asked her bank to claw the money back- they did freeze the transfer, but eventually let him have it.
I only discovered what was going on at the eleventh hour. I could see that he had a string of outstanding CCJs from previous customers. Whenever the bailiffs turn up, his parents say that he doesn't live there.
I searched through the internet and found various social media accounts. His family like horse drawn caravans and his mum makes and sells fake Gucci/etc labels through Facebook. 'Nuf said...
Personally, I feel sorry for the respectable tradesmen on those kind of platforms. They do however have an air of "race to the bottom". Professionals such as @dilalio are competing with the likes of Toby and potential customers often want the job done as cheaply as possible- not properly, just cheaply.
I recently decorated a massive new extension.
I recognised the tiler. Over the years I had seen him on other jobs.
The guy is a competent tiler, but seems to spend much of the day asking potential customers from those Checka type sites to send him images.
At a guess, I would say that he spends at least an hour a day responding to people that may well be wasting his time.
I am lucky that I have been constantly busy for the last 30 years, but if work dried up, yeah, I would consider using one of those sites- needs must and all that.
As an aside, other than the thieving git mentioned in a previous post- my GF decided that she wanted to replace the carpet in our hallway. Rather than wait for me to be available, she used one of those sites. By chance, the decorator only lived about 30 metres from us- he was in between jobs.
He had 5 star reviews and spent a week decorating our hallway. The day he finished, she paid him and asked me to re-decorate it to the standard that I had led her to expect. Annoyingly, I took me longer than it should have because I now needed to sand away the newly introduced orange peel from the walls.
I made a point of keeping the front door open so that he could see me doing the work...
Or, like me, are looking for fill in jobs, between larger projects or for postponed or cancelled work.
Don't forget... I do call out work!
Sometimes an hour here or there... Not looking at this to provide huge projects!
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