How to Find a Good Contractor

How to find a good contractor is a question that all homeowners eventually have to answer.

First things first.

Finding a good contractor comes down to your own personal desires for service, reliability, trust, confidence, and satisfaction. You have to decide before you make any phone calls for estimates, exactly what it is you are looking for in a contractor. I guess what I am saying is this:

* It is true that you get what you pay for.

* You also get who you decide on.

* Sometimes you don’t get what you think you’re going to get.

* Sometimes you do get what you don’t want.

* Sometimes you get more than you thought you would get.

Over the years I have talked with thousands of people about their heating and cooling systems, about repairing them, replacing them and installing them. I have met people who are first and foremost concerned with getting the job as cheaply as possible and then want no further contact. I have met people who want the job done as cheaply as possible and then expect to get premium quality customer service and expect top notch super quality installation. I have met people who were looking for the best possible system with out concern for the price, their concern was quality and reliability and they expect great customer service. I have met people who wanted the middle of the road equipment, and had no more expendable money and were extremely cautious about who installs their system. I also met people who, wanted the top brand, but did not want to pay for it.

You have to decide what you want first! Decide on what your priorities are in your search for a contractor before you start talking to them on the phone. What is your primary and secondary objective of the system replacement or installation. What are the qualities of the product that your looking for, the quality of the installation, the quality of the contractors customer service. Are you looking for a contractor who installs the equipment and then has no further contact with you, or are you looking for a contractor who becomes like the family mechanic that every one in your family goes to and has been you family mechanic for years.

I tend to get customers who are looking for someone they can trust and want to recommend to their family and friends. My customers all know that If I don’t answer the phone immediately, that I WILL call them back right away. Just because a company has a lot of people working for it and has a receptionist answering the phone does not mean that they care one bit about whether the system that you bought from them works or not. Some people find out the hard way that a company is only as good as they people who care about it.

With that in mind, here is what I suggest that you could do to narrow down your search. Once you decide what your priorities are in the following categories:

* Customer service

* Brand quality

* Brand durability

* Reliability - equipment and contractor

* Energy efficiency

* Contractor responsiveness

* Contractor customer concern

* Contractor follow up

* Warranties

* Future repair cost

* Environmental impact

* Contractor honesty

You have to understand that just opening the phone book is a matter of luck and it’s a crap shoot. Use these techniques to level the playing field between you and your contractor.

1. You should start the search by contacting at least 5 good friends and ask them who they had install their heating and air conditioning system. Ask them questions about their contractor that you want to hear good answers to. I suggest this list of questions be at least 20 questions long and cover everything from how the contractor responds to phone calls to how well the system heats and cools the home and how good the quality of work was. Did the contractor take care of their home while working? Is the system loud and numerous other things you may be concerned about.

“One thing to note here“ is that while not every one will put drop cloths down and wear booties, this means nothing if the installers have no really good technical expertise about what they are doing. I’d rather have a guy I have to clean up after and not have problems with his equipment, than to have someone who kept my house clean and have to repair their job shortly after it’s installed.

You should ask your friend if the contractor gave them the installation book that came with the equipment and if he filled out the warranty card and mailed it in or if your friend was given operating instructions about the thermostat and the equipment because that’s important stuff. If the contractor did not take time to fill out the warranty card and did not concern himself with giving your friend the operating manual, you have to ask what other steps in the installation process he may have missed because chances are he missed something.

2. You can go to your city building department and ask for a copy of all of the permits pulled in the city in the previous month or two. Depending on the city you might be able to go back a year or more. Usually the city will charge you a small fee for this service and it’s all public information.

Once you get the list, you can scroll through the list of permits and addresses and home owner names. Lets say you decide you’re interested in talking to XYZ company about an estimate. Now you look at the permit list and see all the jobs XYZ company pulled permits on, then when you ask the XYZ company for references you can ask for specific names of customers who have had them do work in the past based on that permit list. You are no longer in the passenger seat about referrals you are dictating who you want to speak to.

Imagine the power you will have when you ask for references and the contractor gives you a list of names of customers who are not on your list and then you ask the contractor to ask the customers that you want to speak to, if its ok to contact them. If he tries to evade the request or makes up some excuse why you can’t talk to the customers on your list, you may have a real indicator that there is possibly something wrong with what that customer thinks about the job that was done for them. If he agrees to contact the customer and get back to you, I would defiantly expect to have an answer within 24 hours on a majority of your requests. I mean don’t give him time to go back and repair a job he screwed up. A reasonable time period is 24 hrs. Sure the customer may be out of the country, but what are the chances of every one on your list being un reachable?

We could assume for sure that once in a while a customer would not want someone else contacting them but the chances of every customer on your requested customer list not wanting to give your contractor a referral are pretty thin.

I would avoid like the plague any contractor who would not want you to speak with a majority of the people on your list of his past customers, based on the city permits pulled. You can do this in multiple cities and get a really good idea about your potential contractor.

You can also ask the city about the permit and if it is completed or not. I believe that you can ask to see copies of the file on the job to see how many correction lists the permit had on it before the inspector gave it final approval. If you find that your contractor is having tons of corrections on each job you look at, maybe the contractor is careless or just not up to date on the latest codes. Every heating and air conditioning contractor may have a correction list here or there, simply because different inspectors look at the same job differently, but if you find the contractor correction lists are 5-10 corrections or more on every job, the contractor may just be careless.

Good Luck