BuildZoomReviews of buildzoom.com

Reply from BuildZoomOct 17, 2022

Hello Christina, We're glad to hear that you had a good experience with your contractor! We can assure you that we do not charge our contractors to get a review approved. We actually have an integrity team that manually reviews every review we receive on our platform, and there are times where our team falls a bit behind with reviewing them. I pulled up Archibeques Flooring's BuildZoom profile and we see your review is still pending, so don't worry our team will get around to it. We appreciate your diligence with getting your good experience out there for this contractor, it's also in our best interest to help good contractors get good reviews! Contractors on BuildZoom don't pay any subscription fees to be on our platform, they only pay for jobs they win if they received the lead from BuildZoom. It's a pay-per-win model which is much more generous than other contractor lead boards that force them to pay-per-lead, regardless on if they win the job or not! As it relates to posting your review on TrustPilot, we are unable to speak to that as BuildZoom and TrustPilot are two separate companies, we can only speak to your review on the BuildZoom website for the contractor. We hope this provides more clarity on the process and why your review hasn't shown up on their BuildZoom profile yet,

Reply from BuildZoomOct 5, 2022

Hello LB, We are sorry to hear about your dissatisfaction with using BuildZoom to find a contractor. We partner with over 2,000 building departments and contractor license boards to maintain a database of over 3.8 million contractors across the US. When a property owner comes to us, they can use our database to find a contractor on their own, or they can reach out to a Project Consultant to get assistance with finding one. We intentionally do not have our own network of contractors and instead remain as an objective 3rd party that is there to represent the property owner when seeking out a contractor. We gather information from the property owner to develop a scope of work and reach out to contractors on behalf of the property owner to find some that may be interested. Keep in mind that sourcing contractors and architects is free for the Property Owner. Contractors don’t pay a subscription fee to receive jobs, but they do pay a fee for jobs they win. Typically contractors have to pay job boards a fee to even receive a lead, we only charge for jobs they win. All contractors include the cost of their marketing/lead acquisition into their margins and they don’t exclusively use BuildZoom for jobs, so they don't explicitly bill property owners to "cover the BuildZoom Fee." It’s great to know that you found a contractor that fit your needs, however part of why we recommend getting multiple bids is to ensure that the bid and contract are fully inclusive of everything you need. This is why we offer our Premium Service. That’s where you can get a Construction Manager from BuildZoom to review the bids you receive to ensure they’re all-inclusive, get you an accurate price, and ensure it’s all properly represented in your contract. It’s incredibly common in the industry for scope items to be missed in the bid, then when the work begins, and a scope item needs to be added after the contract is signed, the contractor charges a “Change Order Fee” to the Property Owner to make that adjustment. All of the sudden a $100k job becomes $120k (just for materials and labor) + $5k change order fees to just make the changes. It would’ve been ideal to know that the job would have cost $120k to begin with and completely avoid the change order fees and the hassle of making adjustments to the contract. We hope this provides clarity on our service and why we operate the way that we do. We work in the best interest of the property owner, even if it means getting surprised with bids that are higher than the budget they proposed - so they don’t get blindsided with more fees down the line after the contract is signed.

Reply from BuildZoomOct 5, 2022

Hello, We are sorry to hear about your experience with BuildZoom. We found your inquiry with BuildZoom and it looks like we’ve attempted to schedule a call with you multiple times. We sent you a link to get on the schedule but never received a response from you. Days later you messaged us again, where we responded asking you to schedule a time with a Project Consultant. The last response was from us again with the scheduling link. We are more than happy to help if you want to set up some time with a Project Consultant. Our Project Consultants work on jobs valued $50k or more. If your job or budget is under $50k, we have tools for property owners to use to find a local contractor and get some assistance from us via email too.

Reply from BuildZoomSep 26, 2022

Hello E. Warden, We are sorry to hear that you weren’t happy with our communication. First we’d like to clarify that we do not sell your phone number or any of our client’s personal information. You can see how we use the information we collect in our Privacy Policy: https://www.buildzoom.com/privacy-policy When you engage with our Project Consultant team, they act as a representative that sources and help you find contractors in your local area. We go beyond simply getting you a list, we talk to you and develop a general scope of work (by getting your budget and details of what you’re looking for), contact contractors on your behalf, gather interest by reviewing your scope of work with them, and arrange property walkthroughs. If a contractor decides to put in a bid, we help with bid collection too. We know how to work with contractors so we can efficiently coordinate with them on behalf of our property owner, saving you a ton of time and hassle. It’s fairly common that we reach out to at least 10, sometimes up to 50 contractors and only get 2 to 3 of them to express interest in the project. Typically we don’t find that contractors send too much of their own communication to our property owners since they know we coordinate most of the work, so if you’re getting spammed by a contractor we’d like to get that feedback from you about which contractor is doing that. If you do not want to use our concierge & consulting services, you are more than welcome to use our website to find a list of qualified contractors in your area and contact them yourself. If you go to Buildzoom.com, scroll down near the end of our homepage and you’ll find our “Find a Contractor” section. There you can narrow your search by contractor type and zip code to find a list of contractors in your area to browse.

Reply from BuildZoomSep 23, 2022

Hello Barbara, We are sorry to hear that you were dissatisfied with your experience using our Premium Services. It looks like you were recently able to hire a contractor that we sourced for you. We reached out and spoke to 12 contractors and were able to get 4 contractors to bid for your project, collect their bids, compare the bids for you (covering both costs and scope of work accuracy), then get revisions to the bids to ensure everything you need was captured and you got the best value among the 4 contractors. Most of the time the savings property owners get are not a reduction in price for the bid or line items within that bid, since most of the cost is in materials or labor that can’t be reduced, it comes down to getting your scope of work fully accounted for and within your budget to prevent unexpected costs in the future. These future costs are known as “Change Orders.” It’s a very frustrating experience for a property owner to sign a contract for $100k, then later find out they need to pay for more because it wasn’t properly accounted for to begin with. Additionally, there is a “Change Order Fee” that contractors charge for making changes to the contract after it’s been signed. On average, people experience paying up to 15% more than the original contract value because of Change Order Fees (a quick google search for Construction Change Order Fees and you’ll find a ton of results). On a $100k project, it’s easy to end up paying $15k more on change order fees alone (not including the cost of the change itself with material and labor costs). This happens because the property owner is not a construction expert and the contractor missed some things, so unfortunately the property owner is the person who pays for those misses. Our Premium Services help reduce change orders significantly by having a construction expert evaluate all the bids that come in. Especially getting 3-4 contractors to review your property and project, some will catch things others have missed and we get them all aligned. A customer may pay $4k - $5k for our Premium Service, but it will confidently reduce up to 15% of change order fees in the future (which on a $100k project is easily $15k in fees alone). Additionally, our Premium team spends a lot of time going back and forth with the contractors to get contractors interested in your project, collect their bids, and make those revisions on their bids. If a property owner did this alone it amounts to many hours a week speaking with contractors. Also, most contractor’s bids don’t come in on a standardized format. We bring all of their bids together into one single standardized view to make it easy for the property owner to compare and make a well informed decision. So what you paid for protected your time, got you an industry expert to represent your project, and it protected you from future change orders by ensuring that the bid and contract you signed at the end accounted for as much as possible. Reviewing your original bid comparison with our Construction Manager, I see about 30 line items that needed to be clarified by the contractors who submitted their bids. Without that clarification, you may have unknowingly signed a contract with missing scope which would have resulted in future change orders. Regarding your rebate, there may have been a misunderstanding. We typically charge a final invoice of $450 after you sign the contract, however if you end up signing a contract with a contractor we sourced for you (opposed to signing up with a contractor you found on your own), then we waive that final invoice. We confirmed that you were never charged that final $450 invoice and it has been waived. That rebate doesn’t come in the form of a refund, it is applied as a waiver on your final invoice. I hope this provides more clarity on that value of Premium and the $450 rebate. If you have further questions please reach out to us at [email protected].

Reply from BuildZoomSep 7, 2022

Hello Janice, We are sorry to hear that you encountered this problem with a contractor. We help source contractors in your area, however currently can’t provide support after you hire a contractor, however we understand problems may arise and even though the support we can give is very limited, we can provide resources or recommendations on what you can do or where you can go to get help with your situation. If you reach out to our Support Team at [email protected] we can provide you with those resources and recommendations. We also highly encourage property owners to leave a review on the contractor’s BuildZoom profile, it lets future Property Owners know about your experience, and it helps us keep track of a contractor’s performance over time.

Reply from BuildZoomAug 22, 2022

Hello Matthew, We’re happy to look into this particular matter for you further if you reach out to us at [email protected]. However, to provide some context, it could be very easy for a person to falsify reviews, so we have safeguards in place that prevent that from happening. Since we don’t require reviewers to sign up for an account and be logged in, we ask every person who places a review to provide us with some basic contact information. If the reviewer does not provide any, we have no way of validating the review so we reject it. Additionally, we require that the reviews be detailed - in the review box we ask two questions “What was your experience like working with [CONTRACTOR NAME]? Would you recommend the contractor to others?” Reviewers don’t have to answer those two questions specifically, however they demonstrate the types of answers we’re looking for with some fair level of detail. If you browse around at other contractor profiles you’ll see the reviews that are approved typically have a good level of detail. Additionally, with the permit and job data we collect from building departments across the country, we can also validate if the reviewer actually had a job with that contractor. I hope this helps and you can reach out to us directly to review this further.

Reply from BuildZoomAug 22, 2022

Hello Abdef, We’d like to clarify that we do not have our own network of contractors. We partner with building departments and contractor license boards to maintain records of over 3.8 million licensed contractors. When a property owner needs help finding a contractor, we help source one in their area by sharing details of their project with local contractors and coordinating appointments. We also offer a Premium Service if a property owner needs assistance evaluating the bids from multiple contractors, managing the pre-construction process with the property-owner, and evaluating the final contract before the property owner signs anything. We evaluate contractors based on a lot of different criteria to determine if the contractor is the best fit for your project and how reliable they are. Things such as (but not limited to) the number of permits they’ve filed in their lifetime (and in the last 12 months), the number of jobs they’ve completed, the types of jobs they completed, the reviews they receive on different review platforms, the number of years they’ve been in business, their bid-to-hire rate, their licenses, and how responsive & engaged they are with both their clients and BuildZoom. All of these factors, and more, go into their BuildZoom score that ranks them among other contractors in their local area. If complaints have been filed against this contractor and their license is suspended or revoked, we receive updates from contractor license boards and our system will update accordingly by delisting the contractor until their license is in good standing again. As it relates to the contractor’s BuildZoom profile page, the contractor can claim their profile and manage it themselves. If they don’t claim their profile, we still list them on our platform however it’s usually mostly blank. We apologize for the poor experience you had with a contractor you found using our platform. Reviews on Buildzoom.com for the contractor are important, so if you personally had a poor experience with a contractor, make sure to leave a thorough review on their BuildZoom profile. I hope this helps clarify the relationship between BuildZoom and contractors found through our platform.