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You own or rent a home and you need something simple done on your property. Say for example a couple of trees removed and a fence put in, because you have a new dog. How do you find someone reliable and available to do this work?
You can use the yellow pages. You can ask friends for a reference, which may work, but not in every case. If you happen to have a friend who happened to have a similar need whose opinion you trust and who can recommend a contractor, terrific – but even then it may take a few days to locate that person, who may or may not be available. And, if we change the scenario to one of the 1000 or more other things you might want done, the opportunity costs continue to go up, while the reliability outcome stays a gamble. And what if you wanted a satellite antenna installed or your pool cleaned tomorrow? Chances are your friends won’t know people who are both high quality and available.
There are referral services. But, most referral services have a limited number of contractors and have various arrangements with those contractors that may or may not serve your interests the best, and will usually only provide 3 to 4 contractors, who contact you. For some work this method might be OK. For a lot of other jobs or if you are time constrained or if you want to know what actual customers think or if you want more than three or four choices, you’re out of luck.
HomeInitiative.com solves all aspects of this problem for all homeowners in a real-time, regulated, marketplace that is completely free for them to use!
- Post your project or projects for free, any time of day or night
- Receive unlimited bids or proposals from professionals who want the work
- Review the feedback on the professional from other buyers just like you
- Review professional’s prior work by browsing their online portfolio.
- Have a managed negotiation with the contractors online, or speak on the phone with them
- Select one contractor, several, or none
- Pay for the job. Leave feedback when the job is done
- Use Blogs to obtain useful tips on various home improvement topics
At the same time, HomeInitiative.com offers an unprecedented business-building opportunity for contractors themselves.
- Access to dozens, even hundreds of prospective projects they would otherwise never see
- Ability to pre-qualify the homeowner (do they communicate well? Do they pay their bills?)
- Opportunity to craft an online portfolio to use for marketing, complete with their own URL address
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