Recently we were looking at a new charter school for our second grader son. For the school we were considering we decided to look at other parents reviews of that school at greatschools.com. There we found 38 reviews written by parents on the particular school. Based on those reviews, we dropped the school from our consideration. In this case the parent reviews were very helpful.
So why is it that online reviews of home improvement contractors are not as helpful? Here are the reasons:
- In Tucson, there’s around 1000 schools, most public. About 200-300 are charter or private, so most of the online reviews are focused on those. Thus each school has quite a few reviews to look at. In comparison, there’s at least 10,000 contractors in Tucson. On websites like Angies List most contractors have less than 5 reviews thus making them not as useful. Many good contractors have no reviews at all.
- Most parents have had experience with more than one school, so when they write a review, they have some basis of comparison. However, many homeowners will need a particular type of contractor service maybe once every 10 or 20 years, thus when they write a review they do not have a good basis for comparison.
This is why Eugene’s List does not rely on homeowner reviews for contractor selection but on recommendation of other contractors instead.