Why are trades people so incredibly unreliable?!

[motherofkevinnotperry]

I need someone to explain why. What's so difficult with "I'm sorry, I'm not able to do that" or "I'm going to be late", "I'm fully booked", "I need to reschedule" etc etc. How long do you give them before moving on and finding someone else?

I have had more than my fair share of trades just not turning up, making false promises on work then not fulfilling it. They're all so unorganised and terrible communicators. It's so infuriating. Just tell me!

We need part of a roof replacing and it's been horrendous. Some right dodgy individuals about, even.if you go through Checkatrade

My mortgage company sent a surveyor over. He turned up 3 hours late and didn't even try to apologise. It's not just tradespeople.

I am discovering crap workmanship by painters.... honestly rubbish like....not removing masking tape. Painting over it.....not painting straight lines ....leaving masking tape under light fittings( bloody dangerous).....not painting top of door edge part you cannot see.... painting over electrical wiring and radiator bolts.......urghhhhh......someone hold me back.......😡

Exactly. It’s an easy cop-out because people can’t stand to have their other halves criticised or, where the criticism becomes overly harsh, accept that frustrated customers who are repeatedly let down by tradespeople might start to become so frustrated that they might say things that are not necessarily fair by way of response.

I’ve had the same experience with tradespeople too. We need a new boiler as ours isn’t working properly. Contacted 3 different heating engineers in early December (all self employed), they all came out to have a look within the week of it starting to play up. Took a couple of weeks to receive all their quotes, no problem. I picked the person who offered the most advice about installation and changing up some of the controls to make it more user friendly and more aesthetically pleasing (and who was recommended to me by someone I know well). All the quotes were the same price give or take a few £’s. He said great, I’ll order the boiler and pencilled me in for mid January. 3 days before he was due to install it, he called me and said that the boiler hadn’t arrived so he would try and source from elsewhere and come at the end of that week. Never heard from him again and it’s March tomorrow! I wonder whether he got a bigger, better paid job elsewhere at the time and part of me wonders whether he will suddenly pop up when it gets quieter come the Spring but he can shove it now he has shown how unreliable he is. This is one of the things I hate about home ownership, finding reliable tradespeople! We have a reliable Electrician and he is fab, as well as reliable decorators too. I contacted a decorator last year around June time who said he was was booked up until December so he couldn’t help me? Why was he still advertising for work then? I will never understand their mentality! 🤷🏻‍♀️

My worse experience was a local chippie who was recommended to me by his wife ….yes I know ! Came round,quoted a job ,neede to get the materials ASAP.
I went to the village cash point,gave him £200 for ‘materials’ and never saw him again! Wife fielded all my calls with so many obvious lies I actually felt embarrassed for her ,blocked my number and FB and left her thieving husband and that was £200 down the pan! I learnt a lot from that experience!

I do part time admin for an excellent tiler and carpenter, he is booked months ahead so now I inform clients that no quote is possible for x months etc. Also many customers want outdoor work done over winter when its just not possible...dont people see the weather outside..?.....Also many customers book a date and then inform us that their expensive tiles, taps, flooring etc are held up in customs in Italy for 3 months so can they just cancel the job until items arrive....so customers can also be totally unreliable !

@bagsofbats totally agree with you. himself is a builder. he will actually tell you that he doesn't have time to do the jib or that's not what he does. years of being told he too expensive delays that are beyond his control his fault shitty artchitects and his fav clients who think they know better than the builder. like how can you think yoi can get materials cheaper than the actual builder ? self build is a big thing here in Ireland country. couples mostly young who work full time and no experience in building at all decode they can arrange and build their own home themselves far cheaper where as himself is the builder has his set crew for everything knows timelines of things and where to get them etc. he now buys houses himself and renovates them yo sell again. he works six days a week. admin takes forever even though we do have an accounts person. I help a bit wher I can too. to answer the op though he will say yes if he has time or no when he doesnt

Checkatrade etc is known for fake reviews and bad ones are not allowed. do not use those sites.

We had a big job done just after covid (for us £100k) and ended up going with a much more expensive outfit because they actually communicated well! We knew this in advance but decided to keep going because others presented the same issues as the OP.

However they did have a back office person who did the paperwork. Obviously she takes away some of the profit with her wages. This outfit also had several "teams" so could juggle the jobs as they came up.

I don't think a PP was suggesting tradesmen are stupid, more that organisation is a skill lower down the list for many. God knows, the main man at the place we used earned far far more than us. Definitely clever but perhaps not "book smart". However book smart does not earn big bucks any more so fair play.

So basically the lesson is for tradesmen, charge what you like, the customer will pay if you keep your word and appear organised!

Definitely yes to the 'just say no'.

I'd rather they tell me they're too busy than quote or measure up and then never get back to me.

I get this (and I did read OP’s post) but she did go way off beam by not sticking to her original line of argument and starting to say that tradespeople must be awful husbands and dads. She took it down the petty route, no one else did. She pointed out to me that she had no trouble getting quotes but that the problems started further down the line. I’m not denying there are unreliable tradespeople around , but she needs to take a little look at the tone of every single one of her responses, which reveal but by bit that ultimately she (not many of the other posters, whichever side of the fence they sit) views tradespeople as a lesser species. It may be obvious to them immediately or it may take a few visits - but in her specific case I do sense that it is her that is the problem. I showed DH the thread and he said - she’s ‘one of them’. There have been lots of posters on here arguing that tradespeople are unreliable, don’t bother etc etc but it’s only her that has repeatedly done so with the same condescending manner. Ironically some of my husbands best customers are the most educated and civilised - one is a kidney surgeon who exudes nothing but respect for his trades. The ones he finds really snotty are quite jumped up from nowhere types (ha! I’m doing it now!). OP has very little insight into herself and that’s really obvious as the thread evolves.

Wow some of these posts are incredible. So, all tradespeople are "not much for the book learning" and all have ADHD. Hilarious. The problem is that a good tradesperson is in huge demand and can pick and choose. Supply and demand is all it is.

I did this for my late DP, typed up and sent all the quotes, got the materials, chased clients for payment, made sure he contacted them if he was going to be late for any reason. I also did all his accounts and filed his tax returns.

Admin was not his forte and I can see why this might be a problem for some sole traders but the level of twatty comments on this thread is unbelievable. As a previous pp said this is now sadly something that applies to all areas. Some of the worst offenders are in the more "administrative" fields. Don't get me started on our local council SEN department.

My children lost an entire half term holiday a couple of years ago thanks to unreliable tradesmen and we nearly got notice to leave our house.

We rent, privately. We needed some work doing quite desperately to the house so i rearranged work to fit in with the tradesmen - all arranged with the letting agent.

They didn't turn up.

Because it was urgent, I agreed to them coming in the half term, so we stayed in waiting.

Three days they were 'coming out'. Did they turn up? They finally turned up on the Thursday lunchtime (so we couldn't do much afterwards!) to assess the work and then had to come back on the Friday to do the work. My poor kids spent the week sitting in waiting for these arses not to turn up when they literally phoned and said they would be there that day.

Another example was when someone was supposed to come out and do some work. Again, we waited in and no one turned up. This happened twice. We then woke up to a snotty email from the agents saying we were going to be charged because we weren't in for the contractors, who said they had been at the front door knocking and we weren't in, and that the landlord was considering ending our tenancy because of it.

Fortunately we had proof via ring doorbell that no one had turned up to the house at any point and that it was the contractors that were lying. Also helped they said we had the blinds shut - when we have never had blinds 🙈🙈🙈

I find the communication really difficult to deal with too.

I don’t understand why they can’t let you know if they aren’t going to come to an arranged appointment, whether it’s to quote or to do work….but it happens regularly.

I’ve also experienced strings of excuses - so many deaths in one family as to be impossible.

My neighbour is a tradesman, and more than once I’ve heard him on his mobile phone lying to people who’re calling to ask where he. I’ve heard him say he’s in a town on the other side of the M25, that he’s 5 mins away from a place that will take an hour to get to and that he’s got to pick up his sick child from school - when all his kids have grown up and left home. Loads of lies.

I agree that admin isn’t the strength if many tradesmen. It doesn’t mean they’re stupid or lack qualifications even. It’s just not their strength or something they like doing and many don’t put enough time or resources into it.

I think many find it difficult to turn work down even when they won’t be able to do it. They think they might want the work, so say they will quote or say they will do the job, without having the time to do these things. It’s best to just say you haven’t got capacity, but some don’t seem able to acknowledge that or like to have a back-up job, even if they don’t expect to actually do it.

Often, it’s quite simply that they’ve got into a habit of being unreliable or lying or not communicating. They’ve got away with it and still had work …so it’s become the norm to them and they don’t even recognise they’re doing it, or consider it a problem. Often people only hire workmen once, so if someone is unreliable, the workman knows it won’t matter as they will be working for a different person who won’t know in future. Many aren’t that reliant on repeat work.

What people want is tradesmen to be honest and say if they can’t do a job or can’t do it until a cretain date, to let them know if they won’t keep an appointment or be late, and to get back to them about stuff when they have said they will. It’s all about basic communication really.

To be fair I'm 100% sure the tradesman I have working in my house at the moment has ADHD. I can say this because I have it too and am very good at spotting the traits in others.

Brexit kicked a lot of wonderful tradespeople/employees out of the UK, it's now a vastly under-skilled (I'm not saying there aren't lots of fantastic skilled workers, there just needs more of them) and not appealing to young people so it's hard to recruit. I actually work for a company who have been given an advisory/consultancy role working with the sector, gov and educators trying to work out how to resolve this issue. It's a massive problem, especially in terms of trying to get Uk housing up to 'Green' standards.

The people from school who went into trades were annoying lads who misbehaved, would be late to lessons, disruptive and could barely sit down or hold a pencil for longer than two minutes so their lack of work ethic doesn't surprise me.

We've been trying to line up tradesmen since before Xmas. But appears people around here are spending money like it's going out of fashion because those tradies that do come back and bother to quote are telling us Oct/Nov for any works as they're stacked! 😐

I think that anyone who needs non-urgent work, needs to really think ahead and not expect to get workmen booked in for the next 6 months. It’s just how it is. It probably means planning a year ahead before work starts, in order to arrange quotes etc. This seems to be the case with reliable, workmen.

The trouble is when you have an emergency and need someone, or there’s a small job that needs doing fairly quickly. Having HomeCare type services done stem to provide reliable cover these days. Lots of people sign up for those services exactly so they don’t have to deal individually with workmen and all the difficulties with reliability….but these services don’t seem to be what they were.

Lots of MNers who have partners who are tradesmen seem to be really cross about some of the suggestions why tradesmen are unreliable. However, not many have suggested why it is such a common occurrence for workmen to say they will call back…and never do, make an appointment…..and not turn up or let the customer know they won’t be coming or will be late, basically fail to communicate or be reliable. It’s a common experience but it seems like this lack of reliability doesn’t apply to many or any of the MN husbands or themselves who are tradespeople. I think that often, the tradespeople just don’t recognise that they are unreliable or don’t communicate well with customers.

Surely it's not too hard to say 'sorry I'm too busy at the moment so I can't take on new work '

See, this is what I don't get, can someone explain? we've had to ask the management company of the flats to get quotes for work, and they were ridiculous - £ 1k to install three smoke alarms, as one example. When we asked why the quotes for the work were so high, we were told 'they probably don't want the work.' Well - say so, then. I'm too busy, it's too far, I can't commit. All reasonable excuses. Instead they've just pissed us off.

Are you for real?
What a complete load of twaddle. Rarely academic…wow I think it is you need to get educated.
There is a multitude of reasons currently affecting construction trades.
The main being that young people do not want to for the most part want to do apprenticeships, and learn a trade and this has been going on for a number of years. They want more “soft” careers, which is actually short sighted as once you’ve qualified you really do have a skill for life.
Admittedly salaries are low to start with, but if an apprentice shows promise and wants to progress then most contractors do their upmost to retain their operatives.
Yes a good contractor can pick and choose which contracts they want to secure. It’s a free market, and many would rather do a “fast track” job than a slower moving one as there are always delays. A delay represents a financial loss to any company. Ultimately the client will have made no provision for NPO, that is bad news for the contractor. You can have a team standing around for 2 days or more because the client/architect cannot make their mind up regarding a detail. Who is covering the wages?
At that point the contractor has to issue a delay notice and pull labour from site. Finally if the client has resolved the issue the team may have been allocated onto another project, so then said client has to wait.
Thirdly without sounding rude, some clients have champagne tastes and beer budgets, and a contractor can sense this. If a contractor is handed a basic schedule of works with no detail in it, they quite rightly will not quote. These are the worst type of contracts, at the end of the day no one wants arguments about payments.
A good client will itemise the scope of works in detail so there are no grey areas pertaining to the works. A bad client hands over a piece of paper with nothing more than “kitchen unit Howdens”….. nothing about prep work, substrate works, material choices for the walls and floors, measurements etc. That means the contractor has to raise all these queries and that’s even before they get round to submitting an estimate.

Well you've just proved the point! You are dumb if that's what you take from the thread. Reading comprehension isn't your strong point, for sure. What was actually said is that those who go straight into trades don't seem to have learned how to do admin, how to manage their own time, how to manage customers expectations or how to communicate effectively with customers. That's not the same thing as saying someone's thick. It's saying they're lacking in skills, meaning the display behaviour that makes them extremely irritating for a customer to deal with.

Whoever said "they don't need you", yes ok fine - but it doesn't mean it's ok to be rude. "I don't need you so I'll treat you like shit" isn't an ok attitude to have. If they don't want to quote, say so. If they don't want the job, say so. If they say they'll do something eg turn up at 5pm Friday to quote or turn up 9am Monday to start work - then do it! Or at least call to explain why they can't. It's basic manners. Being in demand doesn't exempt them from the need to display basic manners, honesty and integrity. If they think it does, then they're an arsehole.

They also need to understand that if they let a customer down the customer is likely to be upset or angry with them. That's not the customer being a dick. That's normal and justified feelings in response to being messed around and the tradesman should apologize in response, not become defensive or ghost the customer.

Oops quote fail. My last reply was in response to this

Oh bore off, I can't believe people actually come onto the internet and say shit like this to total strangers. Seriously, what the fuck is wrong with you lol