How to get to a shortlist of three in about ten minutes

Short answer

Name the job rather than the trade, sort by distance from your suburb, then cut the list on three things that cannot be bought: the number of reviews rather than the score, a phone number that matches the business's own website, and an ABN you can confirm on the national register. Ten minutes gets you three businesses to ring. The two things to spend the least time on are the star rating and the website design.

Most people hiring a tradesperson do one of two things: ring the first result, or collect five quotes and then choose on price anyway. The first is a coin toss and the second wastes a fortnight. A shortlist of three is the useful middle, and getting there is mechanical.

The ten minutes

  1. Write the job in one sentence, the way you would say it out loud. "Hot water stopped working, gas unit, about eight years old." That sentence is what you will send to all three, and it is what makes their quotes comparable.
  2. Find the right trade for it — the table in our job-to-trade guide covers the 35 most common jobs.
  3. Open the listing page for that trade in your location and sort by distance from your suburb. Distance is the only availability signal that is measured rather than claimed.
  4. Cut everything with fewer than about ten reviews, regardless of score. Below that the rating is noise: 31.2% of perfect 5.0 ratings in this directory come from fewer than ten reviews.
  5. Of what is left, prefer businesses whose phone number matches the one on their own website and whose ABN is confirmed. Both are on the listing. 16.0% publish a confirmable ABN, so this cuts hard — which is the point.
  6. Ring three. Ask whether they cover your suburb, when they could come, and what the callout fee is. You will lose one on the first question.

What to send all three

The same sentence, the same photos, and the same question: what is included and what is excluded. Three quotes for different scopes are not three quotes — they are three different jobs, and the cheapest one is usually the one that left something out.

The two things to ignore

  • The star rating on its own. The mean across 50,654 rated Australian trade businesses is 4.70, so it separates almost nobody.
  • How good the website looks. It is the cheapest thing on the list to buy and the only one anybody notices — and 14.7% of Australian trade businesses have no website at all.

Start with your trade

Common questions

How many quotes should I get for trade work?
Three, from businesses that all received the same one-sentence description of the job. More than three rarely changes the decision and delays the work; fewer gives you nothing to compare a scope against.
What should I check before ringing a tradesperson?
Review count before review score, whether the listed phone number matches their own website, and whether the ABN can be confirmed. All three are free, take seconds, and cannot be bought.
Is the cheapest quote usually the problem?
It is usually the one with the smallest scope. Compare what is included and excluded before comparing totals — the difference is almost always something that still has to be paid for later.

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