How homeowners find a contractor for their remodeling projects is changing. Increasingly, they are skipping the yellow pages or print advertising and turning to online referral services. These services are easy, interactive, and often free to the consumer. A recent post from Remodeling Guy delved into the successes and potential problems behind this new wave of Internet advertising and connectivity.

Online referral services serve a number of purposes. For the contractor, it is essentially a new form of advertising — contractors typically pay to be included on the list. For the homeowner, online services help expedite the contractor-finding process by doing a lot of the legwork. That includes such laborious tasks as:

• License verification
• Background checks
• Referral verification (the service calls references themselves)
• Insurance verification

Many also provide feedback from previous customers and make getting free estimates from these contractors a simple form-filling process.

Add to that the fact that many services are free, and the appeal is not hard to realize. Still, as Remodeling Guy points out, that doesn’t necessarily make online referral services a foolproof option. While the verification services provided are useful, and probably effective in general, it would not be too difficult for a dishonest contractor to get around these obstacles.

That is why the online referral service should not free the homeowner from all research obligations. It is important to remember that many of these services make money off the contractors — a good reason to let some mediocrity slip through the cracks. Now, there are plenty of online services out there; the rise of the online referral service will inevitably spawn even more hungry entrepreneurs to the cause. Therefore, it becomes necessary to effectively research the researcher, for homeowners to spend a few hours looking into the referral services themselves. (more…)

Phone books are falling out of favor with people looking for local businesses. It used to be that your name in the yellow pages was the first line of advertising. No longer. Curious customers have begun moving away from the turn of the yellow page and toward the click of the mouse. As a matter of fact, three of the top five ways in which a Comscore study determined that people find local businesses involved the Internet rather than print media. Here they are:

• 31% visit a search engine, searching without a specific brand or business in mind
• 30% look up a business in print in the phone book
• 19% use Internet directories
• 11% look at local search sites like Google Maps (driving directions)
• 3% get their information from a newspaper or magazine

(more…)