Post Flood Red Flags

The first signs that a company could be a fly-by-night outfit are poor personal appearance, shoddy tools, filthy or broken equipment, and vehicles in poor repair. Not every good construction company will have uniforms, new trucks, cell phones and laptops. Some super-dependable contractors don’t even have fax machines! But how a contractor presents himself and takes care of his truck, tools and equipment is a good indication of how well he’ll take care of you and your job.

When you are re-viewing bids, if a contractor says he will give you a “special low price” that you must keep secret, move on to the next guy.

The same is true for a bid that comes in far below all the others, such as when you get three bids and two of them are around $5,000 and one is $3,200. The low-bidding contractor either is clueless or he never intends to finish the work. Another scam is to bid low and then start charging you extra for materials you thought were included in the price once the job begins.

Finally, pay attention to how carefully the contractor looks at your job before bid-ding. If a bidding contractor just eye-balls the job and says, “Yeah, we did a job like this and I’ll charge you the same,” or if he doesn’t take notes and measurements and make material and labor calculations, you may be dealing with a contractor who isn’t thorough enough to do a good job.

Second-Rate Materials – If a contractor claims he’s already got materials he wants to pass along to you at a discount, watch out. Usually these materials are seconds, ungraded, or below grade minimums for code, or they “fell off a truck”. Small contractors rarely buy in volumes that yield these big discounts, and con-tractors rarely carry large inventories of material. If they do, they severely misjudged quantities on a previous job, which doesn’t speak well for their estimating skills.

Some types of work require a large initial payment from the home-owner because the contractor will have to leave this as a de-posit when ordering. This applies to products like cabinets and special-order ceramic tile. It does NOT apply to commodity materials like roofing and lumber, which are bought “on ac-count” by any legitimate contractor with at least 30 days to pay. Be very cautious if a contractor asks for more than 20 per-cent of the total cost of the job upfront – some states set the limit at just 10 per-cent.

“I’ll do the job cheaper if you pay me in cash” is another big red flag. A contractor who works on a cash-only basis is probably not paying taxes, and almost certainly not paying for insurance. The same goes for a contractor who wants to be paid each day. Drop him like a hot potato!

If your contractor has nothing more than a pager and a post office box, call the Better Business Bureau, your state licensing bureau, or your local consumer protection office to see if there are any complaints lodged against him. Also, check all his references and visit some recent jobs. A contractor should have an office somewhere, even if it is just a room in his home, and a reference at a local bank and accounts with local suppliers.