Would a shared, searchable contractor track record database be useful?

Would a shared, searchable contractor track record database be useful?

Member since 2026 · 7 posts · 2 votes

Hi all. First time landlord here, about to buy my first rental in the Twin Cities. I posted elsewhere on BP asking how people find contractors, and the near universal answer was referrals from other contractors, agents, or PMs, tested with a small paid job first, then tracked over years until you’ve got a reliable bench per trade.

That got me thinking about a concept and I wanted to sanity check it here.

To be clear on what this isn’t: not another Angi or HomeAdvisor (they sell the same lead to several contractors regardless of fit, which is a big reason they don’t solve this). Not Yelp either (open to anyone, no way to know if the reviewer was even a landlord, no data on what actually matters for rental work, like response time, quote accuracy, or reliability with tenant occupied units).

What I’m picturing is closer to the structured knowledge experienced investors build up over years, made shared and searchable instead of stuck in each person’s head.

Two questions:

1. Does something like this exist that I'm missing? I checked BP's own contractor page, local REIA directories, and general contractor sites, and none seem to do this, but I could be missing something regional.

2. If it doesn’t exist, would you actually use or contribute to it, or does the informal network work fine as is?

Honest feedback welcome, including “bad idea.”

0Reply
304 views

1 Reply

Jump to latestLatest
  • Kyle MccawBusiness Member
    Property Manager · Keller, TX · Member since 2011 · 1k+ posts · 1k+ votes
    1mo

    @Tharun Rao 

    On the surface, I think this is a great idea. The challenge is that contractor performance can change incredibly fast.

    We constantly add and subtract vendors from our list. I’ve seen a contractor be absolutely fantastic and six months later be someone I wouldn’t send another work order to. Sometimes they grow too fast and overcommit. Sometimes their best technician leaves. Sometimes pricing gets out of control. And sometimes life just happens—they disappear for a week, their phone gets shut off, or they have personal/legal issues that suddenly make them completely unreliable.

    That’s why I’d be careful with a traditional review database. A glowing review from a year ago could actually be very misleading today.

    We track a lot of KPIs on our vendors—response time, communication, callbacks, pricing, completion time, quality, warranty issues, tenant experience, etc. What matters most isn't “Was this contractor good?” It’s “Is this contractor performing well RIGHT NOW?”

    If you could build something that captured that real-time performance and weighted recent jobs much more heavily than old reviews, I think you’d have something really interesting.

    Contractors aren't a set-it-and-forget-it relationship. You have to constantly evaluate the bench.

    McCaw Property Management4.4911 Reviews
Join the conversationCreate a free account to reply, vote on answers and follow this thread.