The ability of homeowners to quickly get in touch with professional home-improvement contractors in their area has been greatly boosted by the appearance of web-based services such as Home Advisor and Angie’s List.
These online marketing services are not free to the contractor and this marketing expense is passed on to Home Advisor and Angie’s List users – even though the direct service may be free to the consumer. In theory, these services allow customers to let many contractors in their area know about their project, spurring on healthy competition between service providers that should ultimately result in the lowest possible bid for the homeowner. In practice, using Home Advisor or Angie’s List may actually provide the homeowner with three expensive bids from contractors with huge overhead from their sales & marketing budgets, thus driving up the cost of the project.
Neither Home Advisor nor Angie’s List Cut Out the Middleman
Yet, it should be understood that both Angie’s List and Home Advisor’s stated purpose is to provide customers with the lowest possible price on their home-improvement projects by creating competition between contractors. The problem with this model is that it ignores the biggest single expense in any home-renovation project: the contractor’s fee.
General contractors will typically charge between 20 and 30 percent of the total cost of a project, not just the expected net income on a project. This means that the contractor’s fee is effectively a built-in profit margin that is purely extractive, it is coming directly out of the customer’s pocket and going straight into the contractor’s.
But some contractors may charge even more. This has been notably true in cases where contractors have run up high advertising and lead-generating fees on sites like Home Advisor. Although the idea is that homeowner’s get the best possible price through generating competition between bidders, the reality is that deep-pocket contractors often pay top dollar for their listings to rank high in these web services’ search features. They may also spend big money on sales professionals to have a higher success rate of winning business.
These practices tend to diminish, rather than promote competition because companies without large advertising budgets simply aren’t invited to bid on the project. And this inequality means that the very companies with large overhead expenses will be the only contractors bidding on the project – seemingly competitive but all higher than a contractor without big advertising costs.
Paying Those Big Contractor’s Fees Can Make Sense Sometimes, but not Always
The end result of using services like Home Advisor and Angie’s List is often that consumers have an easier time getting in touch with contractors. But they also frequently fail to realize any significant savings in doing so.
Still, the ease of getting a complex job rolling may be worth using those sites even if they don’t always live up to their claims of providing real savings to the consumer. After all, projects like a kitchen or bathroom remodel can easily run into the mid- to high-five-figure range and can involve 10 or more specialty subcontractors on a single project while requiring complex payment schedules, deadlines and contractual terms regarding contingencies. In these cases, most people would be more than happy to pay a general contractor their 30 percent fee rather than trying to play one themselves and risk a botched job, a work stoppage or ending up on the losing side of a courtroom.
But not every job involves coordinating and establishing precise workflows and payment schedules for multiple specialists like drywallers, plumbers, electricians, painters and cabinet makers. In fact, some jobs only require dispatching a single team of skilled workers to the jobsite. A project manager and his crew can take care of the actual labor and complete the entire job in one day.
DIY Roofs Makes You the Contractor and Saves You Big Money in the Process
One common home-improvement project that mostly just involves getting the right team of workers to the jobsite with the right materials is roof replacement. Yet, every single roofing estimate that you will get from Home Advisor or Angie’s list are from general contracting firms. And these general contractors are often taking fees that average around the usual 30 percent. Contracting firms with high marketing budgets and a commissioned sales force will add approximately 20% on top of the 30% management fee.
Paying such a hefty price to the contractor on a full master-bathroom replacement or kitchen overhaul can make good sense. But DIY Roofs is a company that caters solely to customers who are in need of roof replacements. Here, the job of the contractor firm typically amounts to little more than buying leads, winning orders, and dispatching crews to a one- or two-day job. These are things that most people could easily do themselves with just a little nudging in the right direction.
And that’s why DIY Roofs generates an accurate online estimate of the total labor and material costs of your job while also giving you the option of acting as your own general contractor. Using its satellite measuring service, DIY will let you know exactly what you can expect to be paying for your materials and the cost of hiring a roofing crew in your area. This report alone gives you a major edge in any future negotiation with a contractor, providing a comparison sheet between the real cost and what a contractor will likely charge.
Should you choose to handle coordinating the job using DIY Roofs’ easy-to-use website, DIY Roofs walks you through each step involved in acting as your own general contractor on your roof replacement job. While the tasks are easy, the rewards for performing them can be tremendous. Many DIY Roof customers realize thousands of dollars in immediate savings while never having to swing a hammer or climb even the first rung of a ladder.
DIY Roofs Offers Real Savings
Unlike Angie’s List or Home Advisor, customers who make use of DIY Roofs are virtually guaranteed to enjoy big savings on their roof replacement. Whether saving directly on general contracting costs by carrying out those tasks on your own or simply using the powerful information that DIY Roofs’ satellite-measuring service and detailed reports put in your hand, you will be far ahead of the game.
Depending on the region, DIY Roofs has many direct roofing crews enrolled in its service. And unlike Home Advisor, DIY Roofs does not force roofers to pay to play where the biggest spenders get the highest results. DIY Roofs gives the roofing crews access to service contracts without having to engage in bidding, paying fees or buying advertising space. And these savings have been passed on to you.
So, how much can you expect to save by using DIY Roofs versus going with Home Advisor, Angie’s List or even the Yellow Pages? Many DIY Roofs customers save in excess of $2,000 on their roof-replacement projects. The savings can really start to pile up for those homeowners with large homes. Savings in excess of $10,000 are fully possible on homes with exceptionally large roofs.
DIY Roofs Gives You All the Information You Need
One of the key pieces of information that you’ll need to get rolling on your roofing project is the total size of your home’s roof. With DIY Roofs’ satellite measuring tool, you get a precision measurement of your home’s roof size, right down to the square foot, pitch, and exact material list. The information in this and DIY Roofs’ cost reports can give you a big edge even if you decide to hire a general contractor. Maybe you negotiate to buy the materials direct to avoid the contractors 30% fee and ask for a labor only price to manage the project.
But if you do decide to go for thousands in savings by acting as your own general contractor, you will only be required to do a few things, including:
- Going online to book an installation date.
- Ordering materials online.
- Going through a simple DIY Roofs-prepared pre-job checklist. This only takes about 1 hour.
- Making a few phone calls to coordinate the schedules and confirm the weather.
- And making direct payment to the onsite Project Manager upon work completion.
When you go with DIY Roofs and act as your own general contractor, you enjoy deep savings while discovering the actual cost of labor and materials for your roofing project. And those are two things that simply can’t be said when using Home Advisor or Angie’s List.
