#7 ~ How to Find a Good Builder

We know from the comments on our YouTube channel that many of you find it hard to track down a good builder for your extension projects and general building work. In this episode, we offer some solutions beyond the usual first port of call for most people which are the trades recommendation websites. If you prefer to find your builder, plumber or electrician online, try some of these trade finding websites. Checkatrade - https://www.checkatrade.com TrustATrader - https://www.trustatrader.com Rated People - https://www.ratedpeople.com MyBuilder - https://www.mybuilder.com My Job Quote - https://www.myjobquote.co.uk FindaTrade - https://www.findatrade.com SHOW TRANSCRIPT Roger: Hello, this is Roger Bisby from Skill Builder and they're back with podcast number seven. Robin: One of the comments or one of the ones that reoccurs is people say it's all very well as listening to you guys and reading the other comments from professional builders. How do we find professional builders? How do we find good tradespeople, people to work for us? So this is from the general public's point of view. So we thought it would be quite useful to tell what we think is a good way of finding a good builder or tradesmen. Roger: Well, we'll just have a discussion about it. We might not come up with the definitive answer because I think depending on where you are, this is going to be different. Some places you go, you live in a village, you got a little local guy, he does everything for everybody, might have been the undertaker as well because that used to be a common thing didn’t it? A builder/undertaker. Robin: If you're living in the urban jungle, if you're living somewhere where it’s dog eat dog, if you like, then you might have to just take your chances a bit more or you've drawn a blank so you're making phone calls and no one's coming back to you or you're looking at the the directory or nowadays on the Internet and you don't even know what to search for. You think you need a bit of work done in the garden, do I need a landscape gardener? Do I need a general builder? And it's having this kind of like knowledge and packaging it up. So straight away people might direct you towards these branded Internet type operations. Roger: What the bigger companies? Robin: Recommendation portals, for example, you might go to a recommendation portal, put in your job, put in your budget, and then they'll sell those leads onto builders who are paying them a commission. So basically that's one way and a lot of people do find builders like that, but I want to try to steer my opinion away from that because I'm not a lover of that approach, I've never personally done it but I've seen the quality of work of some people who claim to be in these organizations and I think to myself, my goodness me, I mean, it's being qualified by the client. The client hasn't got a clue that they've just had a terribly paved drive down. I know that it's not a good drive, but anyway, I will give you a little anecdote about a bit of advice I gave to one of my good friends yesterday. She phoned me and asked if I had a painter to paint some eggshell handmade cupboards and straight away I said to her, Sandra, I have some really good painters who worked with me on a subcontract b...