Home Advisor is a service that helps to connect property owners with pre-approved service professionals in the area that can help them solve plumbing, housing, and other problems at their properties.
If you’re considering using Home Advisor, you’re likely looking to hire professionals to make repairs to your rental properties. It’s essential that you find the right contractor to secure your bottom line – long repair times could delay a new rental and overpriced work could ruin your budget!
How can you know if finding contractors based on reviews for Home Advisor is going to work for you? The best way is to get a better understanding of the service, how it works, and why some landlords swear by it.
As you review Home Advisor and all it has to offer (which will be shared today), you’ll have the tools that you need to make your own choice!
Table Of Contents For Home Advisor Reviews
Rating
This Home Advisor review brings it in at a rating of 4 out of 5 stars.
Review
Home Advisor earns a ⅘ star rating because it is a useful tool for finding contractors in many situations, but it isn’t always going to be the most practical choice depending on your location and needs. There are some limitations due to the fact that you can only connect with service professionals that are members on the site.
Still, the reviews, support, leads, and overall experience are invaluable to landlords like you who need the assistance to get the ball moving. Landlords in both the planning and booking stages of their projects can find a lot of help on Home Advisor.
Pros
- User-friendly interface makes it easy to use
- Huge selection of contractors
- Offers information beyond just matching you with a contractor
- Allows you to solicit multiple bids
- Great customer support for property owners
Cons
- Limited to contractors who are signed up for Home Advisor
- Not all contracts will see or accept your bids because they have to pay a fee to accept leads
Company Analysis
A simple rating, however, cannot cover the full breadth of what Home Advisor is or what it has to offer to property owners, homeowners, and landlords.
How Does Home Advisor Work?
People like you use Home Advisor to make their remodeling and repair jobs easier. Sometimes, scanning through dozens of yellow page listings or recommendations can get tiring when searching for contractors, and making endless phone calls only to end up with no bid appointments is exhausting as well.
Home Advisor cuts down on the amount of time that you need to put into choosing a home service professional. They register and pre-screen these professionals and then send your bid requests out to the most appropriate parties. Interested contractors can then choose to follow up on the lead to make an official bid.
Once you complete a project request with Home Advisor, their system will push your project lead out to relevant and appropriate professionals. Professionals that choose to pursue the lead for your project will then be in contact with you to set up a bid appointment, and the work will move forward from there if you accept their bid.
Home Advisor sets every project up with three or four different potential contractors at a minimum. This ensures that property owners are able to choose the right fit for the work that needs to be done.
Quickly Request Specific Jobs
Home Advisor is set up to make finding a service professional to help with your work easy. The layout is intuitive and user-friendly, so you simply need to log on to get started on finding the help that you need for your properties.
When you set up your job request, you work through the following steps:
- Choose a category – this ensures you connect with the right type of industry professionals
- Type in your zip code – this connects your project to contractors that are experienced in your area
- Select a specific work type from a predetermined list – this begins the outline of the project
- Choose a reason and more details for the work – this gives potential contractors the information that they will need about the work
- Choose your status – this alerts Home Advisor and potential contractors about whether you are ready to hire or still planning your work
- Set your timing – this lets all parties know what type of schedule you are hoping to work within
- Choose your property type – home or business
- Answer additional questions – Home Advisor will ask about insurance and financing
- Enter a description – enter a description of the work
- Enter the address of the property
- Enter your contact information
After completing all of those steps, Home Advisor will process the information that you have provided. Your contact information is used to connect you with Home Advisor and your potential contractors so that you can begin to narrow down your options and gather more information.
Huge Pool Of Contractors Seeking Work
Seeking to connect with a contractor on Home Advisor means that you will have access to a huge pool of contractors. When you set up your job for bids, Home Advisor will help to connect those contractors with your job if they are a good fit.
There are some interesting points that you should know about the contractors on Home Advisor. To be sent leads and given priority in connecting with clients, contractors need to agree to a small set of fees. In fact, contracts must pay a fee to accept bid leads as well.
What does this mean for you?
This means that the contractors that actually receive your bids and leads are contractors that are invested in getting work done. As marketing on Home Advisor costs them money, the chances are fairly good that you will be able to find a contractor that can actually take on the work that you need to be done.
If you were just browsing a list of contractors that work in your area, you wouldn’t have this same kind of luxury. It might take you twenty phone calls to even find a contractor that is accepting work. By using a site like Home Advisor, you’re improving your chances of finding contractors that are ready and willing to take on your jobs.
The Limitations Of Contractors
You may come across some homeadvisor.com reviews that mention they had a hard time finding available contractors on Home Advisor compared to the number of contractors that work in their region. As mentioned above, service professionals on Home Advisor must pay some fees to get bids, so not all contractors work it into their marketing plan.
Choosing to find a service professional through Home Advisor means that you are limiting yourself to the pool of professionals available, but you are also making the overall process easier on yourself. Ultimately, it is your decision about which is the right choice.
Actual Cost Estimates
One of the most useful tools on Home Advisor for landlords like you is their TrueCost guide. While there are a lot of tools out there that can help you to estimate what certain types of repairs might cost you, those tools don’t work the same way that this guide on Home Advisor does.
The TrueCost estimate guide is based on research in very specific fields, but the numbers that you are shown go beyond just research. When jobs are completed through Home Advisor, the financial details of the work are shared with Home Advisor. Every time that a job is completed, the TrueCost guide updates.
This means that the information given to you in the guide is the most up-to-date and accurate, especially if you plan to use Home Advisor to hire your contractors.
A lot of places that give you this type of information do not have the same kind of insider information about what repair and remodeling work actually costs. Most use information gathered from customers, researchers, or real estate professionals rather than from the actual transactions that occur. While the information gets close, it simply isn’t as accurate.
Landlords need to have the most accurate information possible when they are doing repairs to rental properties after a tenant moves out or looking into a property they might add to their portfolio. With the help of Home Advisor, you can do just that.
Ready-To-Help Attitude
Another great aspect of Home Advisor is that they put a heavy focus on helping property owners understand what type of contractor they should be looking for. In addition to working hard on ensuring that their site is truly helpful, they also have a lot of information on the site that is knowledge-based.
Videos like this one are popular Home Advisor’s video channels and website, and they can even be helpful resources to share with your tenants as well:
Home Advisor understands the value of property owners understanding more than just a number on a job bid. There are times when knowing more about the root of each problem and how you can prevent them in the future is key, and that kind of information is shared by Home Advisor for free.
If you have any trouble with their site, Home Advisor also has a high-quality support team that is ready to help you figure things out. Even if you don’t end up using the site to book any service professionals, there is a lot that you can learn from the site.
Product Line
On Home Advisor, there are dozens of different project types that you can select from when entering a project to get help with. All of the following categories have multiple sub-categories that can be used to easily tailor your project to find the right contractor fit:
- Additions & Remodels
- Energy Efficiency
- Household Chores
- Air Conditioning & Cooling
- Fences
- Moving & Storage
- Architects, Builders, & Engineers
- Flooring
- Kitchen Remodeling
- Bathroom Remodeling
- Foundations
- Landscape, Yard, & Garden
- Carpentry & Woodworking
- Garage
- Painting & Staining
- Cabinets
- Green Home Improvement Projects
- Plumbing
- Cleaning Services
- Handyman Services
- Roofing
- Concrete, Brick, & Stone
- Heating & Furnaces
- Siding
- Countertops
- Home Construction
- Swimming Pools, Spas, Hot Tubs, & Saunas
- Decorators & Designers
- Home Inspectors & Appraisers
- Tile & Stone
- Home Theater
- Drywall Installation
- Walls & Ceilings
- Windows & Doors
- Home Winterization
As you can see, there is a huge variety of information and categorization on Home Advisor. This is because the site is well-organized to make your life easier when trying to connect with the right contractor. By offering this large number of categories (and the associated sub-categories), Home Advisor guides you into posting your project up in the most logical and effective way.
Conclusion
Overall, Home Advisor can be a great resource for landlords looking to improve their workflow. Whether you’re trying to gather information about how much to budget for repairs or you actually need to get some remodeling work done on a property as soon as possible, you can find some assistance with those things on Home Advisor.
As with any service, you need to keep your expectations realistic. If few contractors in your area are registered in Home Advisor, you aren’t going to be as successful as you would be in a very active Home Advisor area. Thankfully, Home Advisor lets you know if there are many available contractors or not when you complete the project signup.
Overall, Home Advisor reviews warrant that it earns a ⅘ rating. For your projects, it is up to you to decide if the pros and cons of Home Advisor line up with your wants and needs as a landlord.