Do you need to make a home repair?
You could try to DIY it and repair your home on your own. But you might not have the time to pull off a home service repair. You also might not know how to perform a particular repair.
In this case, you should look into hiring one of your local home repair services. There are more than 1,500 handyman companies scattered throughout the country and over 90,000 handymen in total.
Before you bring a company on board to carry out home repair services, though, you should make sure that they’re going to be a good fit for you. There are a handful of specific steps you can take to make finding a reputable company a breeze.
Continue reading to learn exactly how to choose a company that you can trust to conduct home repair services for you.
See Which Local Companies Specialize in Providing Home Repair Services
First things first: Prior to hiring a company to provide you with home repair services, you should look around to see which companies even exist in your area. There might be way more options than you would have guessed.
A good place to start would be to use your preferred search engine to search “handyman in Spicewood” (or whichever area you live in) to see which companies specialize in carrying out these kinds of services for homeowners. You might be surprised to see all the different options that you’ll have.
Unfortunately, many homeowners make the mistake of simply selecting the first home repair company they can find. But you’ll be way better off when you cast a wide net and consider all your available options.
Do Your Research on the Home Repair Companies in Your Area
After you’ve created a list of home repair company options in your area, you should use it to research each of them. Although researching home repair companies can become tedious over time, it’ll be well worth all the effort that you’ll put into it.
You should visit a home repair company’s website and/or social media page and learn everything that you can about them. You’ll want to find out:
- How long they’ve been offering home repair services
- Which home repair services they can extend to you
- Which areas they specialize in serving
- What they charge for some of their home repair services
- And more
Leave no stone unturned when you’re researching local home repair companies. The more you learn about your options, the easier it’ll be to choose one over all the rest.
Find Out Which Companies Can Offer the Home Repair Services You Need
If you need to have, say, window repair or window replacement done in your home, you don’t want to hire a company that usually spends most of its days finishing basements. You want one that knows how to provide the window repair services you need.
With this in mind, you should pay close attention to which companies can offer the home repair services that you’re looking for. You’ll want to hire a great window repair company to help you deal with something like a broken window seal.
Browse Through Galleries of the Work Home Repair Companies Have Done
Most good home repair companies are excited to show off all the work that they’ve done in the past. They’ll put together galleries that showcase their work and add photos to them over time.
While you’re poking around on the websites and social media pages of different companies, you should keep a close eye out for these kinds of galleries. They’ll shed a lot of light on what you can expect if you were to hire companies to help you out.
You’ll be able to get a closer look at the quality that companies bring to the table when they’re asked to perform home repair services. You should stay away from any companies that don’t look like they put much effort into their work. You should also shy away from those that don’t seem interested in showcasing their work online.
Look At Which Local Home Repair Companies Have the Best Reputations
You probably wouldn’t go out to eat at a restaurant or get your hair done at a salon without reading through some of the online reviews for it first. So why would you ever consider hiring a home repair company without skimming through their online reviews?
The online reviews that people have left for home repair companies in the past will reveal what kind of reputation they have. You should try to work exclusively with companies that have a wealth of positive reviews from the people they’ve worked with.
You should also think about touching base with family members, friends, neighbors, coworkers, etc. to see if they have any suggestions as far as which home repair companies you should work with. They may be able to provide some insight on which companies would be worth considering.
Check Out If Nearby Home Repair Companies Have Any BBB Complaints
In addition to looking through a home repair company’s online reviews to see what people have said about them, you should also check out their Better Business Bureau profile if they have one. Every halfway-decent company should have a BBB profile set up.
It’s very easy to search for a company’s BBB profile to see if they have one. If they do, you can then go into their profile and find out if they’ve had any complaints filed against them.
Just because a company has BBB complaints filed against it doesn’t necessarily mean that you shouldn’t consider working with them. As long as a company dealt with those complaints accordingly, they could actually turn into a bright spot for a company.
But if you notice that a company has one BBB complaint after another, that isn’t going to be a great sign. It’ll show that you should think twice before you agree to work with them.
Make Sure Home Repair Companies Can Fit You Into Their Schedules
Throughout the duration of the COVID-19 pandemic, homeowners have been renovating and remodeling their houses like crazy. As a result, many home repair companies have been swamped with calls from people looking to take advantage of their services.
You should remember this when you’re reaching out to different home repair companies in an effort to discover more about them. You should see if they would even be available to lend a hand to you.
You might be willing to wait for a few extra weeks to get on a specific company’s schedule. But if a company tells you that they’re all booked up until the end of the year, that might automatically knock them out of the running. Your goal should be to track down a company that has time to perform the home repair services you need.
Compare the Costs Associated With Different Home Repair Companies
One thing that people don’t always realize is that not all home repair companies are going to charge the same prices. Their prices are all going to vary depending on everything from which products they use to make repairs to how much experience they have.
If, for example, you need to hire a window installation company to do work in your home, you’ll find that some companies will charge you $300 per window. Others will charge you $700 per window (or more!). So you could potentially save yourself hundreds of dollars by going with one company versus another.
For this reason, you should contact as many local home repair companies as you can to secure quotes from them. You should then compare the quotes that you’re able to get from different companies to see which one you feel most comfortable with.
The company you choose won’t always be the one with the cheapest prices. You might want to vote against using the company with the lowest prices after noticing that they don’t have much experience.
But at the same time, you might also want to vote against using the most expensive home repair company around. You may be wasting your money by going with them and paying a premium for the same kinds of services you could get from a more cost-effective company.
Evaluate How Well Local Home Repair Companies Communicate
When you’re in the process of having home repair services performed, you’re going to have to communicate with a home repair company early and often. Communication will be the key to pulling off a successful home repair project.
Because of this, you should start testing how well a home repair company communicates from the start. You should gauge how easy it is to touch base with them and pay close attention to how someone from a company speaks with you once you track them down.
If you have a difficult time getting in touch with a home repair company, that will be a red flag from the beginning. It might show that you’re also going to have trouble connecting with a company later on.
Poor customer service from a home repair company will also be a big red flag that you shouldn’t ignore. You’re going to have to speak with someone from a company on an almost daily basis while they’re working in your home. So you don’t want them to be rude to you or short with you at any point.
If you don’t get the sense that a home repair company is fully committed to providing you with a wonderful experience, then they might not be a good fit for you. You can locate a better company than that to assist you.
Be Sure That Home Repair Companies Are Properly Licensed and Insured
If you don’t remember anything else that we’ve talked about here, please make sure that you remember this! The home repair company that you work with has to be both licensed and insured.
If a home repair company isn’t licensed, they might not have a legit company set up. This could come back to bite you later on if a company starts to do work in your home and then disappears on you. It’ll limit the legal action that you can take against them.
If a home repair company isn’t insured, this could prove to be an even bigger problem for you. A company like this isn’t going to provide you with any protection if something gets damaged in your home during repairs or if someone sustains an injury during them.
It’s why “Is your home repair company licensed and insured?” should be one of the very first questions you ask a company. If they aren’t able to answer you with an emphatic “yes!”, you should run the other way and never look back.
You’ll want to have a fully licensed and insured home repair company on your side. The mere fact that they’re licensed and insured will put your mind at ease and prove to you that you don’t have to worry about facing any complications during home repairs.
Call On the Right Company to Provide You With Home Repair Services
As we’ve mentioned a few times now, there isn’t any shortage of options when it comes to home repair companies. You should be able to find at least a dozen or so in your immediate area.
This is a good thing since it’ll provide you with options when you need to schedule home repair services. But it can also force you to do some investigative work to get to the bottom of which company you should hire. Use the tips that we’ve talked about here to get the job done.
Find more useful home improvement tips and tricks by poking around on the rest of our blog.
