BuildZoomReviews of buildzoom.com

Response from BuildZoom· Mar 28, 2023

Hi Charlene, We are very sorry to hear about your experience. I'd like to help clarify a couple of things in your review. We charge an initial down payment to ensure that property owners are serious about getting work completed, and the price of the down payment differs depending on the cost of the total contract. Before we begin our premium process, we have all clients sign a premium agreement which clearly states an invoice schedule, including a description of what you are paying for. At the beginning of the project, all parties involved agreed to change the SKU of the project, thus also changing the invoice structure. Our team notified all client parties at least 24 hours in advance each time a new invoice was scheduled, as proven by our email history. In general during the sourcing stage, our team speaks with the property owner to better understand the scope of the project, and from there, reaches out to the best and most relevant contractors in the area to meet with the property owner and submit bids. In your specific case, our team reached out to a total of 7 contractors in your area for your project, 3 of which were interested in continuing the conversation. When our Project Manager reviewed the bids, they were successfully able to reduce the initial bids quite substantially by catching unnecessary expenses, and limiting potential for change orders during construction. For example, you received an initial bid for $292k, and our after our team reviewed and edited it, we sent it back to the contractor and it was reduced by $33k. This is part of the value of BuildZoom's Premium service: Value engineering. As it relates to your concern about our sourcing process - BuildZoom assists property owners with finding contractors in their local area and act as an owner's rep to help them validate contractors and get through the pre-construction process, however we don’t have our own network of contractors. We partner with over 2000 building departments and contractor license boards across the United States to maintain a database of almost 4 million contractors. Similarly, we receive permit data from city or county building departments. We pull this permit data every day to ensure we have the most updated information for all of our contractors. Again, we are very sorry to hear that you were dissatisfied with our service. I hope that this helps clarify your concerns.

Response from BuildZoom· Mar 2, 2023

Hi Thomas, We are very sorry to hear about your experience. We are taking the appropriate steps internally to investigate and address this issue. It is important to note that BuildZoom partners with over 2000 building departments and contractor boards across the US to maintain records of over 3.8 million contractors. The contractors found on Buildzoom are not employed or affiliated directly with BuildZoom. Think of BuildZoom like Yelp but for local contractors — Yelp maintains a large database of Restaurants, we maintain a large database of contractors and offer services to help source local contractors, and a Premium Service that helps compare and review bids & contracts. BuildZoom offers two services to property owners: (1) a complimentary (free) service where we source contractors in your area who are the best fits for the specs of the project. And (2), a premium service where one of our project consultants manages the pre-hire process for the property owner, which includes bid management, bid reviews, and contract administration. As a property owner using our complimentary service, there is absolutely no obligation to pay anything to BuildZoom when we source contractors for the project. With BuildZoom's premium service, our experienced project consultants leverage bid leveling and normalization to unlock value engineering possibilities to help property owners save money during the construction phase of the project. Customer experience is paramount for us and it's important that people have the best experience when using BuildZoom, no matter which service they end up choosing. If you still need help, please email us at [email protected].

Response from BuildZoom· Mar 2, 2023

Hi Rob, We can assure you that BuildZoom or the contractors we work with don’t inflate prices. Our Premium team collects and reviews bids that contractors submit thoroughly to ensure they are accurate and well represented. It’s not uncommon when a contractor does an initial walkthrough of the property, they’ll give an off-hand verbal estimate, however when it comes down to developing the bid and they price out the cost of materials, labor, and subcontractors it ends up being higher than they initially thought. To clarify our process — the first bids we receive from contractors are usually very high-level and not broken down by line items. We narrow down our choices with the property owner, then go through rounds of revisions with the chosen contractors and that’s when we start to receive bids broken down by lines. In your case specifically, you found and introduced an outside contractor before we had the opportunity to go through iterations. Although you hired an outside contractor, as part of the Premium service we offered to review their contract before signing to ensure it was well represented, which you agreed to and at no additional cost we conducted a contract review, which is something we don’t typically do if a contractor is found outside of our service. We’re sorry to hear that you were dissatisfied with the Premium service and wish you the best with your hire.

Response from BuildZoom· Jan 23, 2023

Hi there, I am sorry that this occurred. Our internal system keeps very good record of call scheduling, among other types of scheduling during the pre-hire process. However, the system needs to be fed information from real people, and sometimes people do make mistakes with this. We would love to help get a call rescheduled for you! In order to gather more information on this, could you please contact [email protected] and provide your full name so we can look this up in our system? Also, if you havent already, could you please try to reach out to the rep who you have been in touch with and request another appointment?

Response from BuildZoom· Jan 18, 2023

Hi Yusuf, We’d like to know more about your issues with BuildZoom. Your review seems unclear. You can reach out to us at [email protected]. BuildZoom partners with over 2000 building departments and contractor license boards across the United States to store the information of over 3.8 million contractors. We use publicly available information provided to us by those departments to create your profile. We also search through the internet for other sources of publicly available information (such as Yelp, BBB, and others).

Response from BuildZoom· Nov 8, 2022

Hello Terry, We believe there is a misunderstanding with your review. It looks like you are leaving a review for Lineman Construction Phila PA however you left it on BuildZoom. BuildZoom is a website where we partner with over 2000 building departments and contractors boards across the US to maintain a database of over 3.8 million contractors. People can use our database, or talk to our Project Consultants, to find contractors in their local area. However, we are not affiliated with any contractors, or are they employed with BuildZoom. Contactors do not pay any subscription fees to be listed on BuildZoom’s website, and they only pay a referral fee for any jobs they win if we referred a property owner to them. There are a couple of contractors with the name Lineman Construction in our database so we’re unsure exactly which one is the one you are referring to, however all of their profiles are unclaimed meaning they’ve never come to BuildZoom to claim their profile or used BuildZoom to receive jobs. We understand that you want to post a review about them on as many sites as possible, however we’d prefer if you located their direct profile on the BuildZoom website instead of posting a negative review about BuildZoom itself as a company. Leaving negative reviews about a contractor helps other property owners know more about the contractor, additionally if a contractor gets a lot of bad feedback or we learn of foul play, we can suspend or completely remove a contractor from our website. Let us know if you have any other questions!

Response from BuildZoom· Nov 8, 2022

Hello Debra, We believe there is a misunderstanding with your review. It looks like you are leaving a review for ADT Solar however you left it on BuildZoom. BuildZoom is a website where we partner with over 2000 building departments and contractors boards across the US to maintain a database of over 3.8 million contractors. People can use our database, or talk to our Project Consultants, to find contractors in their local area. However, we are not affiliated with any contractors, or are they employed with BuildZoom. Contactors do not pay any subscription fees to be listed on BuildZoom’s website, and they only pay a referral fee for any jobs they win if we referred a property owner to them. There are a couple of ADT Solar contractors in our database so we’re unsure exactly which one is the one you are referring to, however all of their profiles are unclaimed meaning they’ve never come to BuildZoom to claim their profile or used BuildZoom to receive jobs. We understand that you want to post a review about them on as many sites as possible, however we’d prefer if you located their direct profile on the BuildZoom website instead of posting a negative review about BuildZoom itself as a company. Leaving negative reviews about a contractor helps other property owners know more about the contractor, additionally if a contractor gets a lot of bad feedback or we learn of foul play, we can suspend or completely remove a contractor from our website. Let us know if you have any other questions!