Finding the Right Contractor: The Essential Facts - Part Two

The conventional wisdom regarding methods for selecting the best contractor holds a handful of misleading and potentially dangerous axioms.
Namely:

1. When searching for a contractor, talk with three different businesses then pick the one whose price for your job is right in the middle.
2. Contractors should give free estimates for their work
3. Contractors should always give a flat price for your job
4. Contractors should specialize in one major thing only

First of all, don’t forget that we always get what we pay for. Hiring a contractor is not the time to be penny wise and pound-foolish.

A really good contractor is a professional, no less so than any architect, lawyer, or physician. First of all, making your selection based solely upon price is no good. You need to be mindful of several factors, including price, but also quality of work, experience with your particular need and how well the contractor will coordinate the flow of the whole job.

Now, while there are certainly overpriced operations out there in any business, the best contractors are often the most expensive ones.  You should expect to pay for quality. No one goes into the designer boutique expecting to pay dollar store prices, yes?  Remember, these folks are professionals. Expect to pay them as such. A good contractor has spent a very long time learning his or her trade. They go through years of training, which often includes specialized schooling, then apprenticeships in the various areas of specialized fields of work, slowly building their skill set, competence and over all confidence. An experienced contractor will cost you more up front but they will deliver a top quality job. At the end of the day, they will save you loads of money that could otherwise be lost in the costly cascade of errors made by a less experienced person. In addition, one of the great pluses of working with a veteran contractor is that their experience means that they will communicate better with you, their client, anticipating well in advance all the little details that make the difference between a successful job and a debacle.

Things that are given away for free generally aren’t worth much. The abundance of companies offering free estimates and “beat any price” deals for work, only detracts from the level of quality of service and taken as a whole, degrades the integrity of the industry. Consumers should expect to pay for all the work a contractor performs, including creating a realistic, detailed estimate for work to be done. Completing an accurate estimate for a project, especially remodeling or complicated repairs takes more time, legwork, and contemplation than most people realize. Essentially, the contractor has to mentally build the entire job in their mind, taking every little detail into consideration, including any work that will need to be done by various trades; plumbers, carpenters, masons etc.

For example, an experienced contractor who has built or remodeled hundreds of bathrooms over the span of their career can tell you some basic things about the possible range of costs for a bathroom; a sense of typical high and low costs and he or she can tell you this information for free. But because the number of variables in such a project is so high, that range won’t really mean a whole lot to you. Let’s say the price for a low-end, budget bathroom could be between $7,000 and $10,000 and at the high end of super luxurious bathrooms with every amenity, could run between $25,000 to $50,000 (don’t laugh) Of what use is hearing, “somewhere between seven to fifty grand?” Not much, but that’s what you get for free. If someone walks into your rental property and with a quick scan gives you a price, beware! On the other hand, that same experienced contractor who gave you the range of prices, can and should be willing to write up a detailed description of the project, iterating each step in the process, giving you a pretty accurate sense of cost. For delivering that detailed estimate, a client should expect to pay a reasonable fee. Keep in mind that the older the building, the more unknowns your contractor will have to wrestle with, the more everyone will need to have a fluid sense of the final price.

This issue leads us to the next one. Some people have the idea that contractors should be able to say exactly how much a job will cost to the penny. Much of the time this is not possible because again, there are too many variables. Particularly in older buildings, whether you are landlord of a single family home or an apartment building, you just never know exactly what you will find until you open the walls up. Sometimes, a job that seems like it will be so easy ends up rather complex. There are a number of ways to handle that. A couple of options are that the contractor can try to give you a flat fixed price, but in that case, you can bet it will be very high because they have to consider everything that might possibly go wrong. Another option is to work on a time and materials basis, in which the contractor bills you for the work as it progresses. There are other ways too of course and we will review these in greater depth in the next article that specifically addresses pricing.

We live in an increasingly specialized society but a really good contractor will have experience in many aspects of construction, from framing to trim and everything in between. This gives them the deep understanding of what is really involved in getting a job done that a specialist just cannot bring to the table. Again, this can save you money in the long run because a contractor with this kind of depth of knowledge won’t get you half way into something and then suddenly run into a problem that a more experienced person would have foreseen. There are horror stories involving inexperienced contractors who started a project, found it was over their head and then just walked away. One of the worst we have ever heard involved a landlord who hired a contractor to build an addition onto a single family home and so create a second apartment to rent. The design involved a complicated roofline. A contractor was hired after a fairly cursory review of their history. They tore the old roof off the house and began work. At first things seemed to go well, but when it came time to build the new roof, the contractor admitted he had no idea how to build it but said he would figure it out. At the end of the workday, the house sat completely exposed to the elements. The contractor drove away and never came back. A contractor with depth of knowledge would have known how to cut those complicated rafters. An honest contractor would have refused a job he wasn’t prepared to execute.

Picking the right contractor is also a matter of good chemistry. It’s a partnership, however brief, and you need to feel comfortable and be able to communicate with your contractor. Do your research thoroughly and don’t forget to trust your own instincts. And remember, you always get what you pay for. Protect yourself and your property by investing in the best craftsmanship you can afford to buy. The quality of the work will serve you well through the amount of rent you can charge to the increased value of your property when you decide it’s time to sell. The care you have taken and the money invested will make your property worth more in the marketplace. Of course, keep detailed records of all the work you have done. (But you knew that already didn’t you?)

Part three of this series will tell you about some of the ways pricing and costs are handled for various projects that a landlord might typically encounter.