Contractors

Finding and Engaging Good Contractors and Trades

What’s a Contractor?

Contractors manage and carry out construction work, directly employing or hiring as needed construction workers and the various trades.

Generally, if you’re undertaking a significant renovation project and not looking to fully project manage yourself, hiring all the general labour and trades yourself, you’ll need a contractor. 

If you’re undertaking something smaller like an bathroom refurbishment, you might be better off just hiring the required trades directly. Either way, much of the following will still apply to individual trades.

Finding Contractors 

It’s best to focus on your local area. You’ll find that building contractors and tradespersons won’t want to travel too far. It takes up time and adds to costs, including transport and materials storage logistics, which are then likely to be reflected in higher quotes so it’s often not a good use of anyone’s time trying to get quotes from contractors or trades who are based further afield.

The caveat to that though is if a contractor is medium to large and they have multiple teams located in different places. Then it matters less if the contractor is based further away from you as they might have one or more teams who are based in your area.

The main options for finding contractors and trades are:

  • Get recommendations from:
  • Neighbours, friends, family or anyone else you know in the local area
  • If you’re not sure who has had significant renovations work done, you could have a look at historical planning applications on your local planning authority’s website.
  • If you’re not (yet) friendly with a neighbour who you know has had work done, don’t be afraid to knock on their door. People often love to chat about their renovations. 
  • Fellow renovators in our Renovations Forum
  • Local social media recommendation groups
  • Other professionals you know or have been on contact with (particularly whoever is handling planning and building regs drawings as well as any building control persons)
  • Keep your eyes open around the neighbourhood
  • Contractors will likely have offices somewhere in the area. They may be hidden away in a business park. If there’s one nearby, look up which companies are located there or go round for a quick look in person. Otherwise, if they don’t pop up on Google Maps, keep your eyes peeled and you might spot local contractor offices nearby and you can get contact info from signs outside or by going in and asking.
  • Contractors will usually put up banners or some other kind of sign with their company name and logo on it at sites where they are already doing work. If you took a wander around the streets near where we live currently in east London for example, you’d end up heading home with at least 5-10 different contractor’s business names. (Again, if you can get in contact with the owners of the property where the work is being carried out, that’s also a  good idea — they’d almost certainly be happy to chat and it’ll help with finding a good contractor.)
  • Use professional accreditation or industry websites, such as:
  • Contractors / builders
  • FMB
  • TrustMark
  • Trades
  • Competent Person Register
  • NIC EIC
  • NAPIT
  • APHC
  • Gas Safe Register
  • HETAS
  • NFRC
  • FENSA
  • TrustMark
  • Use search engines like Google (you can also try Google Maps to see who pops up nearby)
  • Use other Internet search tools, such as:
  • Checkatrade
  • Rated People

Finding Good Contractors 

How do you know if they’re good or not though?

Well, this is the more difficult part and, frankly, you basically don’t.

The trouble is, even if you manage to have the same contractor recommended by several trusted sources and that contractor also checks out in the various other ways, that still doesn’t mean that your experience will end up going as well as others’. Maybe the relationships just don’t prove to be as good for one reason or another. Maybe your standards are different. Often contractors have various people working for them. Some have multiple teams. Maybe you just end up with a different team that proves to be less good. 

The best you can do is some or all of the following:

  • If recommended, ask whoever has recommended them what the pros and cons were. Ask if there are any things they would’ve done differently with respect to their contractor. Ask if there was anything that they would have preferred that their contractor did differently.
  • Check FMB and TrustMark. If the contractor is listed on either or both accreditation sites, that’s a good sign. (Many good contractors don’t spend the money to get accredited and list themselves on these sites though so just because a contractor isn’t on there doesn’t necessarily mean they’re total cowboys).
  • Check online reviews (Google, Trustpilot, etc). Beware that many reviews online are either fake or not especially representative (i.e. 5 star reviews left by relatives, employees, trades and other professionals who work with the contractor). Have a look to see who the reviewer is. If you discover that they’re a general labourer and they work for the very contractor they’re reviewing… hm….
  • Ask for references and examples of their recent work. If you can speak directly to any previous clients without being in earshot of the contractor, that’s the ideal. Ditto if you can see examples of their previous work in person (photos and video footage can be misleading). Imagine yourself down the road working with that contractor and their team. You’ll want to ensure that their past work has routinely been of a good standard as well as key business operational attributes having been ticked off, including things like good communication (with clients, their team, other trades and all other professionals involved), ability to organise, timeliness and working well to deadlines.
  • Ask for and check their insurance documentation (if there’s any sign that this is not in order, it’s a red flag).
  • Ideally also ask for their health and safety policy, accident records and any applicable health and safety executive enforcements. 
  • Check that they have the relevant qualified competent persons for the job, either working as full-time employees for them or as bona fide sub-contractors (meaning trades they hire in on a per job basis). Competent persons are trades that are qualified to self-certificate under a government competent persons scheme. A competent person scheme allows for that tradesperson to self-certify as to compliance with the relevant building regulations. For some, such as gas boiler installations, you’ll need the gas safe certificate from the gas installer who must be a competent person. Others that tend to be most relevant are electricians, plumbers, roofers and glazers. For some, building control can cover if need be, but for others, like gas installations, electrics and plumbing, building control won’t sign-off without the self-certification from the relevant competent person. If the people doing that work aren’t able to self-certify, then building control will look to bring in their own specialists to inspect that particular work, which will increase costs for you. Also, if a competent person scheme trade can’t self-certify, there’s a question mark over whether they should be doing the work in the first place.
  • Check Companies House. Enter the company name (make sure it’s the correct, full name and spelt right as there are many companies out there with very similar names). It’ll bring up the basic registry information. You’ll be able to see:
  • The company name
  • It’s worth doing a few searches for parts of the company name to see if any other similarly named companies pop up with the same registered address and/or with any of the same people running the company. If there are any others, find out why. Maybe they just have more than one company setup and each does different things and there’s no issue. Other times it’s because something bad has happened and they set up a new company with a slightly different name to operate under to side step the issues with the old, existing company.
  • When the company was incorporated 
  • That’ll give you an indication of how long they’ve been running that contractor business for.
  • What its registered address is
  • If any mismatch, find out why. It might just be that their office address is different from their registered address for some innocuous reason. It might be because they changed addresses and haven’t updated the registered address (although that’s at least a yellow flag because they’re required to and the fact that they haven’t isn’t a great testament to the way they’re running their business and organising themselves). It might be because there is something more suspect afoot however. 
  • Key people running the company and what their roles are (by selecting the ‘people’ tab)
  • At least one of the directors should be an owner (the actual contractor person running the business). If the directors are all unknown people, find out who they are. It could be that the contractor is using a spouse, friend or other third-party to act as director, and that is usually not a good sign (it’s likely to be because they cannot themselves be a director for some reason and sometimes that is because they’ve been banned from being the director of a company).
  • If you click on the person’s name, you’ll be able to see what other companies that person is associated with, if any. Keep an eye out for any trail of companies and use search engines to find out what those other companies did and if any reviews or information still exists online for them. The risk again is that they have in the past just set up a new company to operate under because an old one got into trouble for one reason or another.
  • Meet face-to-face to chat and ask questions, including about their business history, types of projects, previous clients, team, sub-contractors, insurance, and whatever else you can think of that you would like to know. 
  • It’s sensible to consider your questions in advance and prepare a list to go through. It’s too easy to just have a random chat and end up none the wiser by the end of it. 
  • Consider things like their communication, punctuality, how organised they are and whether they follow up on questions raised if they didn’t have the answers there and then.

Don’t get too disheartened during this stage. Keep up the search until you’ve found a few options for contractors who check the boxes and who you click with sufficiently well. There’ll be ups and downs for certain but there are plenty of good contractors out there amidst the various less desirable ones.

Engaging Contractors

Finding contractors isn’t too difficult. Finding good contractors can be difficult. Trying to get good contractors locked into your project is like attempting to catch steam with a tennis racket. 

Will You Be My Contractor?

For the renovation of the house we currently live in, we probably had a list of about 30 potential contractors, including at least 5 of which were recommended by the architectural firm after those contractors had expressly indicated interest in our project.

We ended up with about 3 or 4 realistic potentials and then all but 1 of those fell to the wayside. Thankfully they were in our top two list anyway and had stood out to us but it was amazing how the 30 or so options self-selected until we were effectively left with only one.

It was also amazing how many couldn’t seem to get it together to even reply to initial enquiries (or maybe they just didn’t want to for whatever reason). Then for those who did reply, most didn’t go further than that.

To give some examples to illustrate, we had one who replied quickly initially, then vanished for about a month before popping up again. She came to the house, had a chat clearly confusing our project with someone else’s or clearly not having read any of the information we’d sent her, and then vanished again. A couple of months after that, even after the chat and our resending information, she got in contact again and enthusiastically produced a quote that didn’t in any way reflect anything that we’d discussed or sent. Like ships in the night.

As another example, a contractor had immediately called in response to our initial email enquiry. He was hurried and enthusiastic but didn’t seem at all interested in discussing anything. He basically just shouted down the phone “We were on Channel 4 you know! We’re the best! The best!” He asked us to send him a follow up text a day or two later to remind him to get back to arrange an in person meeting and then hung up. We never heard from him again, despite our follow-ups.

Another highlight was a contractor who’d done a big job nearby not long before. He had called back, shown interest and wanted to come round to chat. The chat went well, we walked round the house talking about plans. We had an instant rapport, we thought he was a real contender. Toward the end of the chat, you could tell that he’d decided he wanted the job. He suddenly and enthusiastically shifted the conversation to talking about the jobs he’d done recently, his experience, what he could do for our project and saying he’d send various examples and that he was keen to do this kind of full-house project. He’d jovially let slip at one point earlier that he was quite selective about who he worked for and if he thought he didn’t like someone or didn’t want to do the job, he’d just ignore them until they went away. At the door, we shook hands, said we liked him and were keen to progress things. He seemed pleased. We never heard from him again. 

Many people assume that contractors are going to fall all over themselves to get the work. It depends on the state of the market somewhat but you’ll most likely find that they aren’t necessarily all that keen. Very often you get no replies whatsoever. Other times the communications quickly lead to nowhere. Even when you gel, they seem to be very interested and you’re basically considering inviting them to your wedding and maybe even asking them to be your best man, they tend to then vanish like marvellous, but irritating, magicians. 

The thing is, the perspective from the contractor’s side can be very different to yours.

Some jobs can be better than other jobs. Working for some people can be better than working for other people. Working in some areas can be better than working in other areas.

Contractors have finite time and resources. There are various things that the contractor will consider to try to invest their time and resources well to get the best results for their business. They’ll consider things like the value of the contract, whether or not it’s the kind of project they want to take on, if the site location is convenient enough, timings and whether or not they think you’ll be okay to work with (read: not a pain in the a**).

They’re understandably often very sensitive to getting messed around. Engaging with clients and going through the various checks and processes to get to the quotes stage, and then also the amount of time it takes for them to prepare quotes, is a significant drain of their time and resources. They’re keenly aware also that you’re probably having the same conversations with other potential contractors and so, if they don’t see enthusiasm and early signs of commitment from you, they’ll be gone unless there’s some particular reason why they really want to take on your particular project.

Add to all that the fact that personal circumstances might be to blame. Ideally they’d let you know that, but ghosting people seems to be the done thing.

It’s effectively like modern dating. You spend a long time looking online, sending out random messages to people you fancy, thinking that they’ll enthusiastically reply to you. Instead, you get blanked or exchange a message or two and then get blanked. Perhaps it progresses to meeting in person. Maybe there are a few more messages exchanged after meeting, maybe you meet again, but eventually you get blanked or you blank them. Until, one day, you send a message, you get a reply, the communication exchanges keep happening, you meet and things flow well and you decide you like and want each other enough to commit. You end up chatting everyday. There’s a lot of give and take and ups and downs. You get to know each other very well, good sides and bad. Maybe it all continues to feel relatively easy and you both get what you need from the relationship. Maybe things start to go sour though. Tensions arise too often and too persistently. You find out they’ve been two-timing you or perhaps it just seems like they’re not that into you anymore. It gets ugly, you say things out of anger that you probably don’t really mean but, damn, they had it coming. Then it ends. Abruptly, and potentially through court proceedings.

Anyway, the point here is ultimately that finding and engaging a good contractor is a competitive process. It’s not just competitive amongst contractors. It’s competitive amongst potential clients as well. Whether you realise it or not. 

You shouldn’t let that lead you into hiring a contractor that isn’t a great match though and you can’t let it undermine the checks that you need to do and the questions that you need to ask to be sure that a potential contractor is good and reputable. You do need to be sensitive as to how you go about those things though and the broader dynamics at play. 

When in doubt, don’t rush into things and take your time to find that perfect someone.

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