Competitiveness of tradespeople increasing

Immediately Date: 5 May 2009

Competitiveness of tradespeople increasing during tough times

The recession is having an impact on the prices tradespeople can charge, with the value of the average job completed through Builderscrack.co.nz, a website where homeowners get quotes from Tradespeople, having fallen 24% since last year. Co-founder Keith Roberts says that the falling price of jobs “is partly because we are seeing a drop off in some of the bigger jobs, but it is also because tradesmen are dropping their rates as the market becomes more competitive, which is good news for homeowners, but tough for tradespeople. We are seeing tradespeople willing to travel hundreds of kilometers to work for the day. Some of the builders in particular are getting very desperate”.

Unlike the building and trades industry as a whole, Builderscrack.co.nz volumes are growing rapidly as customers move away from using multiple phone calls to organize tradespeople, to listing the details of a job once on the internet and letting multiple tradespeople come to them. The increase in volumes, coupled with the more competitive market, led Builderscrack.co.nz to embark on redesigning their website to improve the customers ability to deal with the large number of responses. “Users asked for us to give them more control over when their details were released. To address this our improved process lets customers screen which tradespeople they like before agreeing to communicate with them” said founder Jeremy Wyn-Harris. “We decided to go back and check everything was optimized. While the vast majority of feedback on the site had been positive, we listened carefully to the customers to understand what could be improved and invested heavily to make further improvements. We’re pleased we listened, because the feedback since making the revamped site live has been really positive.”

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