Montreal contractor weighs in on “contractor referral” services

Some time ago, we ran a press release from a (new) Quebec contractor-referral service called Reno-Assistance. We admitted we had never heard of them. Tim Goforth, a Montreal contractor, was kind enough to post this – giving his views on contractor referral services in general.

My company does high end renovations, restorations, additions, etc. in the residential sector as well as some commercial work. All my clients are by referral, so I must assume that at least some of them have confidence in my organization. I’ve worked the Montreal market for 35 years and until I read this article had no knowledge of Reno-Assistance.

If they have 35 qualified employees with the construction building skills required to oversee and intelligently comment and criticize a contractor’s work, and their service is free, who pays their estimated $3.5-million worth of salaries plus the profit which I’m assuming the company must make?

I’m sure Reno Assistance will claim that it’s the contractors who pay a referral fee or membership fee – which no doubt in turn gets charged somehow back to the consumer.

I submit that if a Leger poll was conducted to find out how many contractors had confidence in contractor referral companies, the answer would be close to zero, at least in Quebec.

At one time during my career, it was not uncommon to have an experienced representative from the City of Montreal visit the job site to inspect the quality of the work. Now, responsibility for quality control and code adherence etc. has been transferred to the architect, engineer and builder.

In theory this sounds like a simple solution. The three principals are jointly and severally responsible to the client, kind of like a “Construction Management” approach:

The architect bills the client for site visits.

The engineer bills the client for site visits.

AND the cost of the project increases to the point where the owner starts considering black market labour because it’s just too expensive to contract the work legally (unless it’s institutional where we all pay for the overpriced work).

This may be a little oversimplified, but in my sector (in Quebec), if there is a need for “contractor referral” service, the consumer confidence problem has been created by the government and their “never ending” obligation to continue dancing with the trade unions, financing companies, insurance companies, etc.