Consumers BEWARE: 90% of contractors advertising in craigslist are not licensed!

  We all know by now and would agree, craigslist.org is an exceptional and free website to advertise or sell. I advertise my business on craigslist, just for the simple fact that it's free and I appreciate anything you can get for free in this bad economy. I usually renew my ads every 10 days and over the past year, maybe got as many as 3 or 4 decent leads, which aren't bad for free advertisement, so I'm not "anti-craigslist".

 As with any good thing, there are always the shady people who creep in and mess it up for everybody else...in my territory it's the unlicensed contractor.

   My eyes were opened to this because some, "friends of a friend", thought they would save a load of money and hired  "contractors" through craiglist to do some renovations and additions to their home. They of course, thought they hit the jackpot by finding these "professionals" who claimed they had been in business for years and bonus... they only wanted 12 bucks an hour. Well, you can see where this is going...a whole other story could be written just on that! Dozens of no-shows, more shady characters, numerous code infractions, tear-the-wall-down-and-do-it-overs, etc. etc. A 4 month project turned into a year and still going, the last I heard.

 So...when I heard this horror story, I started investigating the craigslist contractor ads, just in my territory, checking license numbers, etc. I was amazed the farther I started to dig into this, the more red flags kept popping up. Some numbers I ran were just random numbers, some bogus, some were numbers from a different states and not even associated with their trade. Some contractor license info at the bottom of the ad was even checked "unlicensed".

  Please understand, if a person has been in business for 20 years and just never bothered to get licensed...something is wrong. Either they can't get licensed due to arrest records, etc. or they are non-skilled, semi-skilled workers at best, moonlighting a legit company, flying under the radar. If something goes wrong, your deck falls down, roof caves in, new driveway cracks, newly built foundation leaks, and you try to hold them accountable for the damages...forget it. The unlicensed, do-it-cheaper, contractor, can't be found. Are you really saving money? The news stories you see of homeowners who got taken for a ride by a home improvement company, will always involve an unlicensed contractor. Fact: Building code is the absolute minimum accepted construction standard. Someone who isn't licensed doesn't even know or understand building code. They think it's all just "red-tape" and it'll be fine without it. They are wrong!

You've been taught all your life the old saying, "You get what you pay for." and it always hold true. Compare apples to apples when getting bids for your project.

The "Jack-Leg" contractor does not care about you or your safety.

This picture is a newly built deck, obviously not built to the minimum building code requirements...by an unlicensed contractor of course. Guess they never bothered to learn that the leading cause of deck collapse in North America is due to some type of ledger board failure. As you can see on the above picture.