Eugene’s List Blog

There are thousands of home improvement contractors in the Tucson area. Choosing the best ones for the job can be a bewildering task. Eugene’s List has developed a methodology for locating and screening contractors.

• For each job request that comes in from a homeowner, we post the work to be done on Craigslist and jobs.eugeneslist.com . The listings are anonymous with all personal information stripped out. We also send an anonymous request to our list of pre-approved contractors.
• For new contractors interested in a job, Eugene’s List checks the license, bonding, and insurance information as well as Arizona criminal records and financial information such as late payments, liens, and judgments from a credit rating agency. We also check for any reports from the Better Business Bureau. If licensed contractors pass all the tests, we put them on the pre-approved list, and only then forward the homeowners contact information to them.
• For unlicensed contractors, we ask them to provide 5 homeowner references and 2 fellow contractor references. If the references come back as positive, the unlicensed contractor is put on the preapproved list. We always disclose to the homeowner if the contractor is licensed or not and we refer only jobs that are “small” to unlicensed contractors.

When Eugene’s List first started out, we only recommended licensed contractors. After the initial feedback, we decided to also recommend unlicensed contractors for smaller jobs. The simple reason for this change is that for a smaller job, an unlicensed contractor can often do quality work for considerably less money and only at a slightly increased risk for the homeowner.

Since there is less public information available for a unlicensed contractor and therefore less accountability, we do additional checks for unlicensed contractors including multiple references from homeowners and also references from other contractors. We always inform the homeowner if we recommend an unlicensed contractor.

It was a difficult decision to make to work with unlicensed contractors, but in order to provide the best person for the job for a homeowner, we felt that we should give a homeowner the choice of working with unlicensed contractors.

A friend of a friend who manages several multi-unit apartment complexes in Tucson had an interesting comment about contractors. Whenever a contractor’s truck pulls up for an estimate, she can tell if the estimate will be high by the shape the truck is in. If its a brand new shiny truck, the estimate will be high because a contractor is paying off a large loan for the truck, and most likely the new equipment inside the truck.

To this, I have several items to add. If the truck is old a beat-up then thats no good either because the contractor does not have pride in his business or is not getting enough business to afford a decent truck (which indicates incompetence or poor customer service). Also, a good indicator is how clean the truck is. Is there equipment haphazardly scattered all over or is it nice and organized. The organization of the truck will most likely mirror how organized the job will be.

So in conclusion, the contractor that pulls up in a clean well organized, but not brand new, truck is probably the best one.