Survey reveals what irks tradies (contractors) the most
Smart Property Investment
By Sasha Karen
18 December 2017

If you want to ensure a hired tradie does the best possible job, an industry survey reveals things you should avoid.

The CEO of tradie finding website ServiceSeeking, Jeremy Levitt, says those who hire a tradie are typically out of their depth and may not realise their demands are unreasonable.

“When [customers] have unreasonable demands it can make it really difficult for tradies to do their best work,” Mr Levitt said.

From a sample size of 700 tradies, ServiceSeeking discovered the top five issues tradies deal with their customers that aggravate them to no end.

The top five things to not do around a tradie are:

Not paying on time
The most despised quality in a customer, according to the survey, was withholding pay, at 48 per cent. This is unsurprising when you consider that tradies are just doing their job, and expect to be paid for their time.

Bartering
Speaking of late payments, haggling was another hated customer trait, with 25 per cent of tradies saying they do not like it. The price of a job is typically not negotiable, and are determined from the result of many different working parts.

Watching over
No one likes to be watched over all the time, and tradies are no exception, as 21 per cent of tradies said when customers do this, it annoys them to no end.

Unclear instructions and changing job briefs
Not being able to get a straight answer out of a customer infuriated 24 per cent of tradies, and another 17 per cent said customers changing their mind. This goes to show that in order for a tradie to do a good job, they need clear instructions they can follow through all the way to the completion of a job.

Backseat drivers
Being told how to do your job by someone with no experience in your field can get pretty frustrating, and it did for 17 per cent of tradies, as they said they found this to be the thing that customers do that annoys them incredibly.

Other annoyances that ended up being minor bugbears in comparison included unreasonable time expectations at 22 per cent of tradies and being spoken down to at 10 per cent.

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