Holy shit, this. If I could get a contractor or a remodeling project like I would an Uber, with a reputation and history system, I'd choose it in a heartbeat, even at a premium. I wonder how they deal with people bypassing the system to avoid their fees (e.g. AirBnb).
This is notoriously hard to do, if not impossible. Every home project is unique, where unknown and unforeseen issues arise all the time. Plus, like many service companies, they have turnover and a growth arc which makes them a moving target. I've used Angie's list before, which was valuable, but with ultimately mixed results. They seem to promote a model of getting good quality, but where price varies from inflated to egregious.
Everything you stated is true, but just points to how much value there would be to unlock for a company that could crack this nut.
But most of the attempts refuse to take on any liability for themselves, and half the reason to use such a company would be accountability and reduction of personal risk.
For the various home projects I've done before, it always feels like such a gamble with a ridiculous amount of information asymmetry, although thankfully the internet has made great strides in fixing that part of the equation.
Uber deals with a commodity - the variance in someone driving you from point to point is pretty low, and the qualitative parts are basically all consumer visible.
The market for contractors is basically a market for lemons. There's 10 bad to downright criminal contractors for every good one, and most customers have no way to judge the actual quality of the work until it's months later and something falls apart.
If you're in the Austin area please let me recommend my friends' startup Quick Residential Rescue[0]
Some great gentlemen who realized that for skilled-tradesman, the real bottle-neck is lead generation. And more importantly, they respect and treat their partners and customers with the utmost of care and regard.
UT picked them up for a major "refreshment" of thousands of units of campus housing and they've completed some stunning work in the short-term-rental market here in Austin with investment properties.
The last time I talked to one of my friends over there, they were focused on the short-term-rental/AirBnB reworks of investment properties as it was lucrative and exploding.
They've only experienced organic growth from what I know which is really remarkable considering their success so far. I'd love to see them meet up with a formidable equity partner and see what they could do at an even larger scale...
Doesn't Angie's List already basically do that? I'm getting a fence right now and it's been easy to send a quick message to a few contractors and schedule estimates.
