HomeAdvisor Versus Handy
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- The Good
- More than 24 home improvement categories
- Cost guide offers comparison pricing
- Quick matching guide
- The Bad
- Must provide contact information to get provider list
Home Advisor is a solid matching service that will put you in touch with highly rated home improvement professionals. It’s free for property owners, but service providers pay for leads, so their marketing budget pays a role in the service providers matched to your job.
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- The Good
- Focuses on home services
- Handles light chores like furniture assembly, painting, etc.
- Provides quick scheduling and fast service
- The Bad
- Limited list of service offerings
Often, when you’re looking at home services listings, the service categories can seem endless. That’s not the case with Handy. This highly focused, niche home services company only focuses on cleaning, light handyman services and easy (but often time-consuming) items on your to-do list.
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- Price
- Free
There’s no cost to consumer users for Home Advisor. All of the cost is paid by the professional contractors using the listing service to generate business. Cost to businesses is unpublished and only available during account setup.
- Price
- Free
There’s no charge to use the Handy matchmaking service, which helps you find local professionals to handle all of your chores around the house. Service fees can vary dramatically, depending on the rate offered by a specific provider. There are several tiers based on professional service ratings, so you pay more for higher-rated providers. That means you’ll want to shop carefully to find someone who is both reliable and affordable.
- Top Services
- Architects and engineering
- Central vacuum installation and service
- Disaster recovery
- Moving
- Sign making services
- Solar installment
- Water treatment systems
These are just a few of the options available through Home Advisor. This listing service covers just about everything you could imagine for both residential and business customers, including organizational services and cleaning. It really is a one-stop shop for all your home improvement needs.
- Top Services
- Cleaning
- Storage
- Hanging Pictures
- Furniture Assembly
- Interior Painting
- TV Mounting
- Moving Assistance
Where Handy really excels is in the details. All of those small chores you keep putting off you can now leave to a Handy professional. You wouldn’t want to pay a contractor’s rate to come in and hang your pictures, but with Handy, you don’t have to. Instead, you can tick off all of those annoying little tasks that can eat a lot of time. Want to paint a room, start packing or finish your spring cleaning? Handy is perfect for these types of jobs.
- Screening Process
- Licensing check
- State business filings review
- Identity verification for business principles
- Search for civil judgments
- Criminal records search
- Sex offender search
Home Advisor does fairly extensive background checks on their service professionals. Keep in mind that some of the checks are limited in scope. For example, the search for civil judgments that may wave a red flag only go back a year. Older issues may not show up on such a limited search. You should still perform your own verification to ensure that nothing has changed since the business signed up for Home Advisor.
- Screening Process
- Advanced screening
- Background checks
When a professional cleaner or handyman signs up to work with Handy, they go through a prescreening and background check. This helps ensure you’re not dealing with someone who may have a criminal record or present a potential problem. After all, you’re inviting them into your home, and you want peace of mind. With Handy, a background check helps give you that surety.
- Guarantee
- No guarantee offered
HomeAdvisor does not provide any direct home improvement services. Instead, they offer a completely free matching service to help you find a local service provider to handle your project. Since they are not responsible for the service, they do not guarantee it. You can discuss service guarantees with individual professionals.
- Guarantee
- Yes
Customer service is a top priority at Handy, and the Handy Happiness Guarantee helps ensure you will be satisfied with your experience. If you aren’t satisfied — no worries. Handy will send out a different service provider for your next service, all at no extra charge. Plus, every Handy booking is insured, so you’re covered in case something gets damaged.
- Support
- Email, phone or live chat
HomeAdvisor offers two different support streams: one for business users offering services and one for consumers looking for a service provider. For businesses, support includes options like budget and lead management. This is also the avenue you would use to report bad leads and ask for a refund. For consumers, you can get in touch to get contact information for a local service provider, ask questions or offer feedback.
- Support
Most Handy support requests are handled via email. That means you might have to wait a little bit to get a resolution, but Handy works to answer support tickets within minutes. You don’t wait for days, only to go back and forth on the issue. Instead, with a fast turnaround time on emails, support is quick and relatively seamless.
HomeAdvisor: User Reviews
Handy: User Reviews
HomeAdvisor: Comments
Handy: Comments
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Home Advisor is one of the top sites in the home repair services marketplace.
How Does HomeAdvisor Work?
HomeAdvisor is a home services marketplace that helps you find local professionals for all of your home construction and maintenance needs. Using HomeAdvisor is pretty straightforward. All you need to do is:
- Find the category that matches the work you need.
- Answer a few simple questions.
- Wait to see which service providers can fit you in.
- Work directly with one of up to four local service providers to get a quote.
Once you have a list of potential service providers, you do all the negotiating directly with the professional. HomeAdvisor simply streamlines the process of finding qualified professionals to work around your home or office.
When selecting a professional, you should still do all of the normal checks you would perform on any contractor. That includes a reference check, confirming that their license is current, and verifying that the company is insured and bonded. Then, you’ll want to make sure the entire scope of work is spelled out in writing. A work order that only covers half the job might leave you very disappointed. Make sure all the terms are spelled out completely and signed off on by both parties.
If you have a home warranty company like Select Home Warranty, make sure you check with them before you hire a home improvement professional, since they may have rules around picking an option.
What Makes HomeAdvisor Stand Out?
There are many home service marketplaces out there, but what really makes HomeAdvisor a solid choice is the extensive screening process and price tag. As a free service, you still get all the vetting you might expect from a paid service. Plus, you get the peace of mind knowing that 30 million other users have successfully found and worked with a contractor through HomeAdvisor. That’s a lot of satisfied customers.
The easy access to reviews is another big plus. Before you start vetting candidates for work, you can see their online reviews. That means you can find a company that has already built up a solid reputation with multiple five-star reviews. You can avoid companies with no reviews or some questionable reviews. The more you know about a contractor, the more likely you are to find and be satisfied with the work at the end of the contract. HomeAdvisor is:
- Free for you to use
- Easy to navigate
- Under your control and allows you to select contractors directly
- Transparent and makes reviews available without collecting contact information
HomeAdvisor Reviews
While it is true that dissatisfied customers are more likely to leave a review than happy customers, you might be a little nervous if you just look at the total scores for HomeAdvisor. At the Better Business Bureau site, while it has an A+ rating, its composite score is only 3.9 stars. Why does HomeAdvisor have so many negative reviews? Remember, while HomeAdvisor is free for consumers, contractors and professionals that use the service pay for leads. When those leads don’t turn into paying work, negative reviews are a common side effect.
In order to generate the best service for consumers, HomeAdvisor always has multiple contractors respond on a single quote request. That ensures healthy competition for every job. It also means that contractors are often looking at a lower conversion rate. So, the reviews from consumers are often five-stars, but business users may have a different opinion. It takes time and expertise to make a lead generation service pay, and some small business users don’t have that expertise in-house.
Many consumers will use these marketplaces as a starting point but never finalize a contract. Unfortunately, this can result in lead charges for the business. A bad lead costs just as much as a good one, but that doesn’t mean HomeAdvisor doesn’t provide a valuable service that works for thousands of local contractors.
Is HomeAdvisor for Me?
If you are a consumer and need help with a home improvement project, HomeAdvisor could be a great place to get started. Not only will you be able to use their calculator to estimate costs, you can also start looking at the different local service providers and their customer ratings. Plus, since HomeAdvisor does a fairly comprehensive background check when listing professionals, you can start contacting pros before you do your own due diligence and reference checks.
If you’re a business, the price might be a big factor in your decision-making. HomeAdvisor does not publish the rates for their lead generation services. That means you have to contact the company and go through the process of setting up a profile to see what the charges would be for your business. Ultimately, small businesses that find it difficult to maintain a steady workflow might benefit from a service like HomeAdvisor, but you’ll want to set careful limits on the marketing budget for the account.
How Does Handy Work?
Handy offers an extensive network of professionals to handle all your household needs. From leaking faucets to dirty dishes, skilled professionals do it all. Using Handy is quick and seamless. You can schedule a service call quickly to handle anything you need. You fill in a form that details the size and scope of the job. Within minutes, a Handy professional will contact you to discuss fees and scheduling. It’s that simple.
You can look at the ratings for every Handy professional and find the one who best fits your needs. Just remember, Handy separates out handyman services from cleaning, so don’t expect your cleaner to replace an outlet.
Once you’ve made contact with several workers, you can easily sort by price and confirm a time for service. Handy will give you an estimated amount of time needed to complete service, based on the size of your home. For example, if your home has three bedrooms and two bathrooms, Handy recommends a 4.5-hour time frame. The shortest time frame usually recommended is 3 hours, but additional space doesn’t add as much time as you might expect.
A service like Choice Home Warranty can insure some of your home items and help you find home professionals when those items need to be fixed.
What Makes Handy Pro Stand Out?
There are lots of cleaning services, many offering monthly contracts. There are also plenty of handymen offering work by the hour or by the job. What makes Handy so incredible is the combination of both services through a single platform and the streamlined approach. Because Handy focuses solely on these two basic categories of service, you get highly experienced professionals in each.
Another option that makes Handy so exceptional is the ability to work with the same person again and again. Why go through the hassle of finding another cleaner who does windows the way you like them? With Handy, you can just schedule the same person to come out on a schedule. You get all the benefits of a routine cleaning contract without the commitment. Every job is singular, but with history-tracking, you can always re-book.
The Handy Happiness Guarantee is another big bonus to working with this home services company. Very few other home services companies offer any sort of guarantee, and even when they do, it usually only covers damage or job incompletion. With Handy, the guarantee covers your satisfaction. If the job isn’t done well, you can get a revisit from a different professional, at no extra charge. That’s a real guarantee.
Handy Pro Reviews
Handy is relatively new to the home services market. It started in New York in 2012, and rapidly expanded. With more than three million completed bookings under its belt, it probably comes as no surprise that there are plenty of negative reviews out there. Some of them come from disgruntled cleaners and others from dissatisfied customers. A missed appointment or poor experience with a single contractor can often lead to a one-star review. However, if you look at individuals on the Handy marketplace, you’ll notice that the average rating is 4.5-stars.
Ultimately, no company can always deliver a 100 percent satisfactory experience. What Handy does deliver is an affordable service and easy scheduling. You might have some pain points as you cycle through a few professionals to find one who works well in your home, but once you do, you’re likely to join a host of others who rate the service highly.
Is Handy Pro for Me?
Does your to-do list keep getting longer? When you’ve got an ever-growing laundry list of household chores and not enough hours in the week to get them done, Handy is the type of service you need. You can get help with:
- Cleaning the toilet
- Folding the laundry
- Mowing the lawn
- Washing windows
- Vacuuming
- Small maintenance tasks
- And much more
When you’re busy, keeping up with the endless round of cleaning and maintenance tasks that go into maintaining your home can be impossible. Handy takes some of that off your plate. You’ll still need to cook dinner, but at least you can avoid the clean-up afterwards. Plus, you can get as much or as little cleaning as you need. For example, if you’ve got guests coming and just need those rooms freshened and made ready, schedule a one-time service. You don’t need to pay for the whole house when all you need cleaned is a few rooms.
If you want regular cleaning service, that’s also available. And you don’t need to stock the cleaning supplies. Handy professionals bring their own, so all you need to do is let them in and go over your chore list.
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