Whether it’s improving your home, like completing an extension to your home or installing new windows or fixing something that’s gone wrong, the laws of probability say that at some point as a homeowner you’ll have to find a tradesperson to carry out work in your home.
And when it comes to something as important as your home, you need to have complete trust in the person who is carrying out work on it.
Here’s a guide to finding a trustworthy tradesperson who you can be sure will make a success of whatever project you need completed in your property.
Search for positive reviews
The knowledge about people’s past experiences of a particular tradesperson and their work is just a click away, thanks to the internet. Online reviewing platforms, like Google Business, Trustpilot and Trusted Trader, are a good way to gauge the quality of work and service of a tradesperson, before even choosing them. Positive reviews than are a good indication of skill levels and experience, as well as customer service.
A quick tip for using review sites—generally speaking, the better regarded a tradesperson is, the higher they will appear in the results pages on these sites, so this means the well-regarded ones will appear near the top of the page.
…and also read the negative ones too!
Negative reviews can be just as enlightening as positive reviews. In fact, you can often gain valuable information about particular limitations in a tradesperson’s work or conduct that you don’t receive from simply positive reviews.
That said, even the most exceptionally skilled tradesperson will probably have a couple of unflattering reviews. The key is to balance the information you read and to use reviews gathered from a lot of different sources.
Look for accreditations
Accreditations are a useful way of gauging the competency, skill level and reputation of a tradesperson, giving you extra peace of mind when it comes to carrying out work on your home. Put simply, an accreditation is an official statement that shows a particular person is qualified to carry out a task to a particular standard. These will normally be listed on their website or business card.
Accreditations will naturally vary depending on the trade of your particular tradesperson. Common ones include City and Guilds, ACS Training, Dulux Select, GAS safe, FENSA, Trustmark and Federation of Master Builders.
Check that the tradesperson has insurance
A good tradesperson will always have insurance. If they aren’t clear about whether or not they do have it, check. The last thing you want is someone who isn’t insured properly completing work on your home, only for something to go wrong and you being left to pick up the cost of repair.
Talking of accreditations, Nicol are members of the National Association of Estate Agents and The Property Ombudsman which shows the excellent quality of our services. We consider every home and every seller individually— there is no one-size-fits-all policy when it comes to selling your home with us. Discover how we can help you today by getting in touch with our teams at our Newton Mearns or Clarkston branches today.
This guide was contributed by Sainsbury Bank.