Hiring the right firm for the job
Upgraded HomeStars rating system helps homeowners make safe choices
Homeowners used to be able to flip through the Yellow Pages, call up the company with 25 years of experience, and have their services completed in a timely and professional manner most of the time.
And then businesses adapted to accommodate the Internet and, suddenly, the number of companies grew at an exponential rate.
It became difficult to weed out the reputable companies from the fraudulent ones, and Google reviews only do so much.
So, some of us ask friends or family members to recommend a good contractor that will get the job done. And some of us will pick someone randomly, hoping that it’ll all work out.
Best-case scenario: The company is professional, affordable and does a fantastic job.
Worst-case scenario: Hire someone else to fix the problems that the first hire caused.
HomeStars, the leading online community connecting homeowners and home-improvement professionals in Canada, tried to tackle this problem by incorporating reviews into their system.
Consumers could directly connect with companies and hire their services, evaluate the interaction, and post a review online.
The original version expressed the company’s score as a rating out of 10; it was simply an average of all the reviews the company had ever had — new or old. Similar to most review sites online, it did not take into account any other factors.
The new review system, called Star Score, reflects not just their review ratings but all the information that HomeStars has gathered about each company. So, in other words, it takes into account both customers who have written reviews as well as HomeStars’ own recommendation about who to hire. It works on a proprietary algorithm, taking into account four key measures: average rating, review recency, reputation and responsiveness.
HomeStars’ integrity team personally authenticates all reviews, and those that do not meet the guidelines are not published. The Star Score now ranges from 0 to 100 per cent and is displayed beside a star atop each company’s page.
Recency measures the time since the company last had a review published. The rate at which it starts to affect a contractor’s rating varies by category — in the same way that duration of jobs varies. Reputation takes into account whether a contractor has ever attempted to post a fake review or bullied homeowners to remove a negative review.
Responsiveness measures how reactive companies are to homeowner requests. The goal was to give consumers power: by providing homeowners with the ability to make informed decisions, they gain control and confidence by selecting whom to hire based on others’ experiences and reviews.
At the end of the day, consumers want to invest their money into a company, or individual that they can trust to do the job well.
According to the Financial Post, when dealing with renovations, 33 per cent of Canadians note they are concerned about the reliability of contractors.
HomeStars hopes to eliminate some of these issues by providing a new, multi-faceted scoring system for consumers.
The foundation will continue to be published reviews written by homeowners about their improvement experiences, but reviews written by more frequent users are weighted more heavily now.
Homeowners looking for companies can be confident that the highest-rated companies have no review tampering, suspicious behaviour, and are engaged on the platform. They gain the ability to make informed decisions.