Hey any contractors on here use home advisor.com? Is this a good move or no? I'm getting emails daily from them what's the catch?
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Here is my take. I am only speaking about my own experience with HA. I joined on my own, no sales person called me. I wanted to give residential service work and installs a try in our area. I have found HA to be very fair.
The issues I did have are with the people who use HA. The Homeowner.
My 1st issue. Many people using HA are tire kickers. Just looking for how much something might cost them, so they fill out the form to get some prices. Once they have their prices, many decide not to spend the money, but you will be charged for this lead if you were one of the contractors the lead was sent to.
When this has happened to me, HA has credited the cost of the lead to me each time so far. It is a nuisance but it is not HA causing the issue.
My 2nd issue. Most of the jobs are small repairs and HA has many users that just do not want to pay enough for small repair jobs to cover the O&P your particular company needs to operate.
We don't have this issue from other sources we use to earn our business. HA seems to be full of hard sell customers you need to work harder on to make the sale, for mostly small repair jobs, so its hardly worth the sales time invested.
These are the two biggest issues why we do not use the service much anymore. Basically the work that comes from HA hasn't been worth the time you invest to look at, price the work, answer the calls, deal with the tire kickers, report bad leads to HA for credit, etc…
Speaking for myself only, I have never experienced anything I would consider unethical or shady business practices from HA. They have treated me very well.
So, IMO, you won't make much money because of the type of jobs that comes from HA, and when you add in the time wasted to deal with the nuisance issues, I feel it is not worth effort.