Roofing business weirdness
Discussion
I phoned around a few places this morning to get somebody to come and look at a repair on my roof.
One guy said he could come and quote the same day which he did do - at the time this seemed reasonable as it was raining all day so I assumed roofers would have a bit of free time on their hands. Anyway, he had a look, seemed to know what he was talking about, made a few suggestions etc etc. then quoted on the spot (gut feeling was that it seemed a little expensive maybe, but nothing to compare it to) and said he could get some 'lads' round in the morning to do the job which I agreed to.
After he left, I started doing my due diligence. He's got reviews across all the sites, Google, Yell, MyBuilder and all the others... not huge amounts, maybe 20 or so per site which were all averaging 4-5 stars and seemed generally positive with the odd irrational Karen mixed in but nothing to be alarmed about.
The alarm bells started to ring when I did an image search on his website's 'gallery' and found every single image was copied from various other roofer's sites. One site that I found during this search seemed to be near identical to this guy's site with just a different name and colour scheme but the underlying template was basically identical and they had many photos in common.
I phoned him back to ask if he can come next week so I can at least get some other quotes and he gave me some story about being on a contract in Scotland next week. Why a roofer from the midlands would be on a job in Scotland, I don't know.
My gut feeling is just not good about this guy so I canceled it altogether.
I just feel that it's all really odd, could he really fake so many reviews over so many sites without getting a load of bad ones too? Could he have done a reasonable job despite the non-genuine photos?
Was I harsh to cancel, or is this kind of setup a known thing in the industry and best avoided?
One guy said he could come and quote the same day which he did do - at the time this seemed reasonable as it was raining all day so I assumed roofers would have a bit of free time on their hands. Anyway, he had a look, seemed to know what he was talking about, made a few suggestions etc etc. then quoted on the spot (gut feeling was that it seemed a little expensive maybe, but nothing to compare it to) and said he could get some 'lads' round in the morning to do the job which I agreed to.
After he left, I started doing my due diligence. He's got reviews across all the sites, Google, Yell, MyBuilder and all the others... not huge amounts, maybe 20 or so per site which were all averaging 4-5 stars and seemed generally positive with the odd irrational Karen mixed in but nothing to be alarmed about.
The alarm bells started to ring when I did an image search on his website's 'gallery' and found every single image was copied from various other roofer's sites. One site that I found during this search seemed to be near identical to this guy's site with just a different name and colour scheme but the underlying template was basically identical and they had many photos in common.
I phoned him back to ask if he can come next week so I can at least get some other quotes and he gave me some story about being on a contract in Scotland next week. Why a roofer from the midlands would be on a job in Scotland, I don't know.
My gut feeling is just not good about this guy so I canceled it altogether.
I just feel that it's all really odd, could he really fake so many reviews over so many sites without getting a load of bad ones too? Could he have done a reasonable job despite the non-genuine photos?
Was I harsh to cancel, or is this kind of setup a known thing in the industry and best avoided?
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