BuildZoomReviews of buildzoom.com

Response from BuildZoomSep 26, 2022

Hello E. Warden, We are sorry to hear that you weren’t happy with our communication. First we’d like to clarify that we do not sell your phone number or any of our client’s personal information. You can see how we use the information we collect in our Privacy Policy: https://www.buildzoom.com/privacy-policy When you engage with our Project Consultant team, they act as a representative that sources and help you find contractors in your local area. We go beyond simply getting you a list, we talk to you and develop a general scope of work (by getting your budget and details of what you’re looking for), contact contractors on your behalf, gather interest by reviewing your scope of work with them, and arrange property walkthroughs. If a contractor decides to put in a bid, we help with bid collection too. We know how to work with contractors so we can efficiently coordinate with them on behalf of our property owner, saving you a ton of time and hassle. It’s fairly common that we reach out to at least 10, sometimes up to 50 contractors and only get 2 to 3 of them to express interest in the project. Typically we don’t find that contractors send too much of their own communication to our property owners since they know we coordinate most of the work, so if you’re getting spammed by a contractor we’d like to get that feedback from you about which contractor is doing that. If you do not want to use our concierge & consulting services, you are more than welcome to use our website to find a list of qualified contractors in your area and contact them yourself. If you go to Buildzoom.com, scroll down near the end of our homepage and you’ll find our “Find a Contractor” section. There you can narrow your search by contractor type and zip code to find a list of contractors in your area to browse.

Response from BuildZoomSep 23, 2022

Hello Barbara, We are sorry to hear that you were dissatisfied with your experience using our Premium Services. It looks like you were recently able to hire a contractor that we sourced for you. We reached out and spoke to 12 contractors and were able to get 4 contractors to bid for your project, collect their bids, compare the bids for you (covering both costs and scope of work accuracy), then get revisions to the bids to ensure everything you need was captured and you got the best value among the 4 contractors. Most of the time the savings property owners get are not a reduction in price for the bid or line items within that bid, since most of the cost is in materials or labor that can’t be reduced, it comes down to getting your scope of work fully accounted for and within your budget to prevent unexpected costs in the future. These future costs are known as “Change Orders.” It’s a very frustrating experience for a property owner to sign a contract for $100k, then later find out they need to pay for more because it wasn’t properly accounted for to begin with. Additionally, there is a “Change Order Fee” that contractors charge for making changes to the contract after it’s been signed. On average, people experience paying up to 15% more than the original contract value because of Change Order Fees (a quick google search for Construction Change Order Fees and you’ll find a ton of results). On a $100k project, it’s easy to end up paying $15k more on change order fees alone (not including the cost of the change itself with material and labor costs). This happens because the property owner is not a construction expert and the contractor missed some things, so unfortunately the property owner is the person who pays for those misses. Our Premium Services help reduce change orders significantly by having a construction expert evaluate all the bids that come in. Especially getting 3-4 contractors to review your property and project, some will catch things others have missed and we get them all aligned. A customer may pay $4k - $5k for our Premium Service, but it will confidently reduce up to 15% of change order fees in the future (which on a $100k project is easily $15k in fees alone). Additionally, our Premium team spends a lot of time going back and forth with the contractors to get contractors interested in your project, collect their bids, and make those revisions on their bids. If a property owner did this alone it amounts to many hours a week speaking with contractors. Also, most contractor’s bids don’t come in on a standardized format. We bring all of their bids together into one single standardized view to make it easy for the property owner to compare and make a well informed decision. So what you paid for protected your time, got you an industry expert to represent your project, and it protected you from future change orders by ensuring that the bid and contract you signed at the end accounted for as much as possible. Reviewing your original bid comparison with our Construction Manager, I see about 30 line items that needed to be clarified by the contractors who submitted their bids. Without that clarification, you may have unknowingly signed a contract with missing scope which would have resulted in future change orders. Regarding your rebate, there may have been a misunderstanding. We typically charge a final invoice of $450 after you sign the contract, however if you end up signing a contract with a contractor we sourced for you (opposed to signing up with a contractor you found on your own), then we waive that final invoice. We confirmed that you were never charged that final $450 invoice and it has been waived. That rebate doesn’t come in the form of a refund, it is applied as a waiver on your final invoice. I hope this provides more clarity on that value of Premium and the $450 rebate. If you have further questions please reach out to us at [email protected].