Tradies - The Good, the Bad and the Truly Ugly
Needing a tradie, such as electrician, plumber or carpenter often causes anxious moments for retirees not blessed with tradesmen in the family, or a reliable, long-term connections with existing tradespeople. Sometimes it is an emergency and they have no idea what the "cost should be", whether it was fair and whether they can rely on the quality of the work.
For all the tradespeople in Australia who accurately reflect the honest, hard-working tradesperson appearing in myriad television shows, there are also a smaller number who perform poor quality work, charge enormous fees, don't arrive on time, park across your neighbour's driveway or manage to do all of the above. How then do you find a good tradesperson if you don't have connections, perhaps having just moved into a new home?
It is absolutely clear that no reliance should be be placed upon the large high profile websites that appear prominently on any Google search and allow you to book tradies and provide a ranking - very few tradesmen receive poor rankings and that is just not reality. Who really believes a statement like, the "Average rating of Plumbers servicing "Suburb X" was 4.92 out of 5 based on 3000 ratings." Google reviews are somewhat better, but you need to go through them very carefully and look at each comment made - and consider questionable any comments made by individuals who have made only a single ranking. Google reviews, just like any online review system, can be "managed".
Then there is the wider issue, not just confined to tradesmen, of sponsored reviews. It is almost impossible to avoid product and service reviews in the public press which provide glowing endorsements followed by a small paragraph indicating that the reviewer had flown on the aircraft, gone on a holiday, driven a car, watched the film or theatre production, stayed at the hotel or resort at the expense of the provider. Many of these reviews are simply indirect advertising, and represent a risk to the publications brand if it relies upon objectivity - which is why we continue to have a problem with organisations such as National Seniors publishing finance articles that have been sponsored by product providers.
In any event, we think the only solution to the tradie issue is to develop and maintain local networks – that is to say, if you're new to the neighbourhood you should contact your immediate neighbours for personal recommendations regarding plumbers, electricians, carpenters et cetera. If, in your experience, these tradesmen represent quality and honesty, they should be nurtured and recommended to friends and other neighbours - so they don't need to rely on paying for leads, which costs both you and them money. Similarly, if you find tradesmen have been dishonest, have wildly over quoted you on certain work or simply not turned up to do certain work, they should be remembered and rewarded by not being used by friend's, family and neighbours.
All obvious, but this local networking seems to have disappeared in favour of things digital and in this situation digital simply isn't best practice. At the present time, with a large amount of work around, this approach may not faze the poor quality tradesmen ... but times change.
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Just to provide an individual example of how calling a national 1300 number can be more expensive than going local. We have a Rheem gas hot water system that failed one day - and after unsuccessfully to relight the pilot light and not enjoying cold showers we called Rheem's 1300 number - and was told that there was a minimum callout fee of $275 and they couldn't say when a plumber would arrive the next day; in other words we would need to stay home. That all sounded extraordinarily unattractive and through contacts we arranged a local plumber that gave us a time the next day, cheerfully fixed the issue and cost less than $200. Issues will differ of course, but the moral is to shop around - "big" doesn't mean better. |
What we probably need is to maintain a list of "good tradies" run by experienced, retired ex-tradies in each state and territory - how you would keep such a process transparently honest will be challenging, but not impossible. The intention should always be to reward the right behaviour, and we are not sure that's happening at the moment.