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Preventing Getting Suckered

By Terri Rimmer

How many times have you been taken advantage of by service personnel, be it mechanics, home contractors, handymen, or repairmen?

Well, goodbye to all that.

At Angieslist.com you can find recommended, tried and true tested information on contractors that you won’t find anywhere else with names for your specific area of need and geographic.

Gone are the days when you could ask your neighbor for a cup of sugar or the name of a good washer repairman.

Now with all the manic energy of the 21st Century people are turning more toward their own resources for finding these avenues, sometimes with success, sometimes with not so good results.

Either way, Angie’s List, the word-of-mouth network for consumers as they call themselves, lists more than 200,000 members across 27 cities. More than 5,000 submissions are given to the list every month from people all over the country.

More weight has been given to a report where work has been completed.

For instance, a build year date helps you locate companies that work on homes similar in age to your own.

“Grades” are given on submitted reports from members in categories of overall, price, quality, punctuality, professionalism, and responsiveness.

Lists within the List will tell you each company’s grade, reports received, contact information, distance to your home, discounts, and if they’ve won any Angie’s List awards.

You can get more detail also about certain services they perform, hours, years in business, forms of payment, and if they give free estimates.

Members pay a fee to join and you can sign up for multiple years. Continuous service can be billed to your credit card each month on your anniversary and annual dues are billed each year to the card. A $10 sign-up fee only applies one time provided you keep your membership current.

“Joining Angie’s List has really helped me to get work done on my house because it gives me immediate access to names of companies that my neighbors recommend,” said Julie, a member in Pittsburgh, PA.

Companies don’t pay to be on Angie’s List.

Vicki Georges encountered nightmares after working with her contractor helping her husband renovate an old house. She said there were incorrect orders, no-shows, disappearing acts, and general lack of responsiveness on the part of the contractor.

“Once I caught a bathroom remodeler drilling holes for a towel bar only it was on the wall opposite of where he was supposed to be,” she said in an article.

So when she saw an ad for Angie’s List she signed up.

The list is available over the phone or online and has been active in Chicago for four years where it is extremely popular.

A company cannot buy its way onto the List, according to its founder and a business can also land on the site’s “Page of Happiness” singing its praises.

Georges used to work in customer service and said the List has a good number of South Side companies on it.

”I like to use local people whenever I can,” she said in a San Diego Tribune article. “As soon as I joined I added the companies that I knew were good.”

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