How to select a good contractor

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Everyone knows to check the licence and compare the price. Both are necessary and neither is sufficient, because a current licence means someone met a minimum standard once and a low price means someone typed a smaller number.

The things that predict a good outcome are less obvious and more reliable.

Have they done your specific job before

General building experience is not the same as experience with your project. A contractor who has done forty bathroom remodels knows where the surprises hide in a bathroom. The same contractor doing their first structural opening is learning on your house.

Ask directly how many of this kind of job they have done recently. The answer, and how comfortable they are giving it, tells you a lot.

How they behave during quoting

This is the most underused signal available, and it is free. The quoting stage is the best behaviour you will ever see from a contractor. They are trying to win your business and have received nothing.

If they arrive late without warning, take a week to send a quote, answer questions vaguely, or do not remember what you told them last time, that is the optimistic version of how the project runs.

The quality of the quote itself

A quote is a work sample. It shows how carefully someone thinks and how clearly they communicate.

A good quote breaks the work into recognisable parts, states what is excluded, notes assumptions, and gives a timeline that sounds like it was thought about. A single line with a total is not a quote, it is a number.

References, asked properly

Any contractor can supply three delighted customers. The useful question is not whether they were happy but what happened when something went wrong.

Ask a reference: did anything unexpected come up, and how was it handled? Did the final price match the quote, and if not, why? Would you use them again for something larger? The answers to those three tell you more than an hour of general praise.

Whether they say no

A contractor who agrees to everything is a warning sign. Experienced people push back. They say that layout will not work, that timeline is not realistic, that spending money there is a waste.

Someone who says yes to every request either has not thought it through or intends to renegotiate later, when you are committed and the wall is open.

Who will actually be on site

The person quoting is often not the person doing the work. That is normal on larger jobs, and it is worth knowing.

Ask who runs the site day to day, whether they use subcontractors and which trades, and who you call when there is a problem. A clear answer is fine. A vague one means nobody has decided, and it will be decided badly under time pressure.

Insurance, asked specifically

Ask for a current certificate of insurance rather than a verbal assurance. Ask specifically about workers' compensation if a crew will be on your property, because an injury involving an uninsured worker at your house can become your problem.

The gut check

You are inviting this person into your home for weeks, and you will disagree about something. The question worth asking yourself is not whether you like them, but whether you can imagine raising a difficult subject with them and being heard.

If a contractor is dismissive of your questions while trying to win the job, that will not improve once they have your deposit.