Partial solution to an industry wide problem – Angi: Find Local Home Services Review

I was drawn to this app from the advertisements on this old house. I hoped through the claim of thorough customer reviews that I would be able to find a local Tom Silva with the skill and availability to work on my project. When I started a project I was inundated with contractors calling me, immediately and repeatedly even on Sunday — that was ok considering it’s often difficult to get them to pick up the phone let alone come out for an estimate. However there was very little value to the contractor’s rating/reviews. There were either few choices or few ratings, I could not assess a quality referral. This was further validated when several were no-shows for estimates and the ones who did show up were sales consultants with very little operational knowledge and no ability to advise on even the slightest complication. With only 3 choices I picked the only 1 who showed up on time and submitted a review to complain about the others who did not even show! The job still took over 2 months to get on the schedule and another month to complete a simple gutter install, a 1 day job that had to be rescheduled 4 times, but since I already submitted a review about the estimate I could not submit another review for the job itself. It appears the app is geared toward collecting positive feedback as only a successfully completed job in a reasonable time to completion, is rated. No doubt there’s some good results for straight forward projects but this app does nothing to close the skills gap and doesn’t seem to even have the ability to recognize it. This is probably a bigger problem then 1 app can solve but I hope with direct ability to feedback and rate this will drive improvements in job quality and professionalism in the industry.
Review by bigred1612 on Angi: Find Local Home Services.