Educating You on Contractor Referral Companies

When you type into your search engine, “Painting Contractors San Diego,” what are some of the first websites that almost always appear in the results? If you are using MSN and Yahoo for your results, you will typically find websites that are referral companies. Referral Companies are websites that have been designed to help contractors grow their business with free or paid listings. One of the first companies to begin this idea was ServiceMagic. They had a great idea for people who did not know how to find a quality contractor. A homeowner would check the appropriate boxes of services he or she wanted to have done, and within a few hours or a day, several “pre-screened” contractors would call to set up an estimate. ServiceMagic has a good screening process, which most companies do not have. In this article, we wanted to shed some light on our opinion of the latest referral online companies.

Since the success of ServiceMagic, dozens, if not hundreds, of referral services have popped up on the web. They spend a lot of time and money on making their websites hit the top of search engines. In order to find individual websites of contractors, you would need to scroll down to the bottom of the page or the second and so on pages of the search engine.

Some of the latest and greatest referral based companies on the web today that have grown in popularity are Angie’s List, Superhomecenter.com, Contractors.com, and Kudzu.com to name a few. Some of these companies advertise that they are bringing pre-screened and professional contractors to you. However, we are beginning to see that most of these companies are no different than the yellow pages. They are not the BBB nor do they have a strict screening process. The homeowner has a choice of reading a few reviews that may or may not be 100% accurate and then the homeowner selects a couple of contractors they feel comfortable receiving bids from. This approach does not guarantee perfect results.

You will find Chism Brothers Painting on most of the websites we listed above. Why? Because many of our competitors are on the pages as well. We need to have a presence wherever we can, but we did want to educate you all a little more on the latest web based referral companies. In short, referral companies help contractors grow their business regardless of whether the contractor is an exceptional company.

To learn more about how to make a wise decision on hiring any contractor, read our Apples to Apples article.