Summary: Hi I’m Cherie Barber from Renovating for Profit. Now as an experienced renovator, one of the most common questions I’m asked by people new to the renovating game is: “How do you find good trades people?” Now, what I can tell you is that ninety five percent of Tradies out there are great, honest, genuine blokes, who generally want to do the right thing by you when they’re doing works for you. But no doubt, there are definitely some cowboys out there. So here are a couple of my top tips from weeding out the good from the bad: first of all, always make sure you speak to personal friends, families, get personal recommendations for trades people. So, ask around. Have you used a tradesperson? How were they? Did they finish on time? Did they finish on budget? Did they charge you any variations? This is one way to find definite good trades people by people you’d know and trust. Second thing is that if you do have to find the tradesperson, cold-calling so to speak, from the newspaper, the internet, then there’s a couple to things that you want to do. First of all, you wanna make sure that you check their license online. There is a website called www.licenserecognition.gov.au and you can go online and actually find out a lot about trades people in that regard. What you want to do is, a lot of trades people will supply (if you ask) three references. Now I think it’s absolutely ridiculous to go and see three references. The most important question is (asking the tradesperson): “Can I go and see the job that you are currently working on right now? If they have no job to show you, alarm bells would start ringing for me. So go and see their current work, on the current job they are working on, and go and speak to the owners. And just say, the owners you know, quiet word, how did you find the tradie, are they good, did they have done what they say they would? It’s just one way to weed out the good from the bad. Now, always when you’re sourcing trades people, make sure you get three quotes. This is really important if you don’t know what the cost of the work should be as well. If you get one quote, what have you got to benchmark it against? So as a general rule of thumb, get a minimum of three. And for big ticket items, like windows and doors, you can even get up to ten quotes. The more, the better. And, this is one way to avoid you, being ripped off. Now, potentially you’ve got a couple of tradies you’re thinking about hiring. Couple of key steps you can take to weed out the good from the bad: the first question you wanna to say is, “Are you licensed?” Each trades person in Australia needs to have an appropriate license for their work. And of course, tradies are gonna say “Yes, I’m licensed.” Don’t trust that. Go one step further and say, “Can I physically cite your license in person?” So when they hand that license to you, make sure that the person on that license is actually the same person standing in front of you. Check their name, to the name that they actually got. I have been caught up on this in the past where people have actually given me the licenses of other people. So don’t always trust what people say to you. The second key thing you want to check is their insurance. Each tradesperson needs to have what’s called a Public Liability Insurance, to safeguard them against any accidents that happen on site. Now what I can tell you is that a lot of trades people like any occupation, live day-to-day, week-to-week. And these insurance policies can be thousands upon thousands of dollars. So of course a tradesperson is going to say to you, “Yes, I’m insured.” Again, you want to go one step further and actually cite a copy of their insurance policy. What I can tell you is that I’ve asked this question over the years and many times and said to trades people, “Are you insured?” And they say, yes, yes, yes. And then when you actually go and ask them to cite a copy, they all suddenly can’t find their insurance policy or they come to you an[...]
