How to Find Contractors for Home Repairs in 2024

Call me a traditionalist, but as a real estate developer, I find contractors the old-fashioned way. I call up some people I know, get some quotes, and put them to work. But most homeowners, especially first time homeowners, don’t have a substantial real estate network. So what should a homeowner do when the water heater goes out? Here’s your step by step guide with some contractor marketplaces to try out.

Ask Your Friends and Neighbors For Contractors

Just because you’re not a real estate developer doesn’t mean you can’t ask people for recommendations. The old ways are still the best ways. Finding a contractor comes down to trust, competency, and price– in that order. Your friends and neighbors are looking for the same things. So ask around! After all, the greatest compliment a contractor can receive is to get a referral.

How to Vet Contractors

Getting the contact info for a contractor is just the first step. Every job is different, so you need to put contractors through the gauntlet to make sure you’re getting exactly what you need at an appropriate price. Do your research so you don’t sound like a clueless idiot, otherwise contractors will smell blood in the water and charge you multiples of a fair price.

1. Verify Credentials and Licensing
   • For small emergency fixes, you can skip this step, but on bigger jobs, you need to get a lot of paperwork in order. Confirm the contractor’s licenses, certifications, and insurance coverage.
   • Ensure they understand local regulations and will comply with them.
2. Provide Details to Get Detailed Estimates
   • Put in the work to understand as much of the job you need done as possible. Find out serial numbers for equipment or parts. Watch some YouTube videos to do basic troubleshooting. The more knowledgeable you are, the more accurate of an estimate you’ll get from a contractor. The less you know… well, garbage in, garbage out.
   • PRO TIP! Sometimes I’ll even use a contractor to get information, knowing that they’ll over-quote me for being ignorant. But I’ll use all that info with the next contractor to sound like I know exactly what I’m talking about.
   • Get written estimates from at least three contractors. Use their pricing against each other.
   • Require that each estimate includes itemized labor and material costs.
3. Check Previous Work
   • If you found a contractor through a referral, ask your friends to see the work the contractor did. Otherwise, just ask the contractor to see some existing projects or past work.
4. Review and Sign a Detailed Contract
   • Ensure the contract covers all your anticipated scope, timelines, payment terms, and dispute resolution. Don’t wait until a dispute arises to understand what I mean by dispute resolution. If a job is especially big, retain a lawyer to make sure you’re protected.
   • On bigger jobs, expect change orders (additional charges for out-of-scope work). These will inevitably arise.

Trusted Contractor Marketplaces

If you have no friends or neighbors, I’m sorry. But thankfully the tech industry has been trying to help people find contractors for decades. A handful of large contractor marketplaces are mature enough to be in my “trusted” category. I’ve used them, and so have millions of other people. Their sheer size ensures that at least some of the contractors on there are good. And their rating systems actually mean something.

You still have to do your research and follow most of the above steps to vet out your options though. A large chunk of contractors will not show up on time, try to overcharge you, and will not complete the job. These contractor marketplaces help generate leads, and do the best they can to indicate whether you can trust contractors, but you still have work to do after choosing them. So you have to stay sharp and maintain high standards!

Note, some of these links are affiliate links, and I would get a discount or commission if you use their services after clicking. I keep these reviews unbiased, but this helps pay for my overheads!

1. ANGI Homeservices (Angi)

Angi Homeservices (formerly Angie’s List) tops this list because it’s one of the biggest and oldest (founded in 1995) contractor marketplaces out there. It has over 500,000 contracts in its marketplace and 6 million customers, so the review system does its job quite well. And it owns 2 other companies on this list. Although homeowners can find contractors for all sorts of jobs, the platform is ideal for small one-off jobs. I recommend for homeowners to try out multiple contractors across multiple small jobs to find their go-to handymen.

With any of these contractor marketplaces, your results may vary, and there’s plenty of nightmare contractors out there. So it could take some time to find trustworthy ones, and it’s always good to have 2-3 trusted contractors that you can call in case of an emergency. It’s free for homeowners, with a subscription available to access contractor discounts.

2. HomeAdvisor (Aquired by Angi)

HomeAdvisor was one of Angi’s main competitors until Angi bought them in 2017. Founded in 1998, HomeAdvisor is also one of the oldest contractor marketplaces. With over 30 million users and 200,000+ contractors, it’s not going away any time soon. Homeowners can find contractors for any category of jobs, but it differentiates from Angi by being better suited for larger jobs, like a kitchen remodel, bathroom remodel, or roof replacement.

HomeAdvisor also has useful resources like cost guides and project planning resources so, like I mentioned before, you don’t sound like an idiot when managing these contractors. It’s completely free for homeowners- HomeAdvisor makes money entirely off the contractors.

3. Houzz

Houzz is a comprehensive home remodeling and design platform that brings homeowners, contractors, and designers together in a unique online community. A frustrated couple created this website in 2009 to share photos for design inspiration. It rapidly spread by word of mouth and became a legitimate company a year later. Today, it’s one of the largest contractor marketplaces, with over 40 million customers and 2.7 million contractors worldwide.

It distinguishes itself from Angi and HomeAdvisor by taking a design-first approach. So if you are looking to remodel, Houzz does a great job of giving you design ideas before leading you through a project. Since it started as a user-generated content site to provide inspiration, its content library is massive at this point.

But Houzz goes further than that. Beyond inspiration and finding contractors, you can also fully design your project with its 3D floor planning app. You can stick to 2D if you’d like. (Keep an eye out for my upcoming blog on how to use your phone to create 3D floor plans) And they’ve expanded into retail as well with an entire e-commerce section on their site. Houzz is competely free for homeowners to use.

4. TaskRabbit

TaskRabbit (get $10 off when you click this link) specializes in providing labor for everyday tasks and same day service, and isn’t limited to home repairs. TaskRabbit’s emphasis on background checks and user reviews helps with filtering out the bad apples, but none of these platforms are perfect. Ideally, this is for quicker, low skilled jobs and lower paid around the house. It may be a good idea to hire a few people from here to help the more expensive contractors with the easier stuff to lower your overall project costs. One thing to note, TaskRabbit is integrated with IKEA for furniture assembly!

5. Pro Referral

Pro Referral, which was bought by Home Depot, connects customers with local, background-checked professionals for various home improvement projects. Leveraging Home Depot’s massive retail footprint, Pro Referral marries material procurement with contract labor. For example, it makes a ton of sense to get leads for a carpet installer as you’re buying a carpet. It’s a natural next step for DIYers to get help on their home improvement projects. I’ve gotten quotes a few times out of its sheer convenience, and the pricing was competitive.

6. Amazon Home Services

Chances are, you’ve seen Amazon Home Services if you bought something from Amazon that can be installed. It’s a service option that appears when you add specific items to your cart. Like Home Depot’s Pro Referral, it leverages Amazon’s gargantuan customer base as a lead generation tool. So for customers like ourselves, it’s just convenient to decide if you want to have someone do the work of installing what you’re about to buy.

For the most part, I haven’t found the pricing to ever make sense for small purchases. Because if you’re going to hire someone to install a light fixture, you’re covering their time to get to your house as well. But pricing gets better for more complex installs. This is more about convenience than pricing.

BEWARE: Thumbtack

Thumbtack was founded in 2008 and has reached unicorn status. But that’s what concerns me. Their $275 series I round at a $3.2B valuation is a huge red flag to me. It probably means they’re not profitable, and if you read Reddit threads or even Thumbtack’s own community boards, you’ll see lots of frustration with the cost per lead. They’re stuck in a difficult spot where if they need to raise pricing to be profitable, they’ll lose customers. The platform is one of the largest contractor marketplaces, but just be wary they may not survive.

AVOID: Handy (Acquired by Angi)

Handy was founded in 2012 as a home cleaning service marketplace, but they’ve always been a mess. Cleaners are low skill, low paid workers, and Handy has always had issues getting decent workers to stay on the platform. It’s got awful reviews on almost every aggregate review site- except for Angi, because guess what? It’s owned by Angi. They now offer a variety of other services, like installations, handymen, lawn care, and renovations. But there’s plenty of other options on this list. So avoid the potential headache and try those instead.

Derek Hsiang

Derek is the founder of The Proptech Scout, as well as an NYC landlord and real estate developer. In a former career, he bootstrapped and exited an e-commerce business while side hustling as a strategy consultant.

www.theproptechscout.com