Angies list

Hey,

Is anyone a member? I am, and would like to trade info.

Rog rfsmith48@gmail.com

I apologize in advance, but what is the point of Angies list? I understand it is a review site, but you have to pay a not insubstantial fee to use it right? Why not any of the million other free review sites? Yelp? Google?

I'm afraid that I place very little weight on online reviews. Anyone can say anything, with no fear of consequence.

Slightly related- I am always amused by the Tirerack reviews where customers brand new tires are MILES better than the worn out old E36 M3 they had on before...

I believe the intent is to avoid the biased reviews that might be in other places. I am not sure how they avoid having people post their own reviews or having competitors post bad review, but charging to do it certainly makes it less convenient.

I always hate to use money as a filter, but the reviews on Angie's list do seem a bit less scattershot and insane and more thorough than, for instance, yelp.

They also seem to have more reviews for small, local businesses who aren't even recognized by google. I'm without a guess as to why there are so few reviews for things like architects on google, but googling for architects gets me three places with one review, a few more who've been recognized with a place page but no reviews, and then general results. Angie's list gave me a couple of dozen with anything from a couple to pages of reviews.

Perfect? Heck no. Another tool, and I barely trust yelp to decide where to have dinner; wouldn't use them for anything important.

I don't trust Yelp either. I have heard them called shake down artists by local businesses here in the bay area. Some troll will writes crappy review, sometimes including details that make it doubtful he/she was ever a customer. If a business owner contacts Yelp, they are told Yelp has no reason to doubt the integrity of the review. If the business would like "advertise" on Yelp, they will investigate. If the business doesn't "advertise" on Yelp, somehow many, if not all, of the positive reviews of the business magically disappear.

Yeah,

All of the comments above are correct, more or less. We used Angies list because we ran out of friends/relatives that could recommend flooring contractors.

Angies list charges $39/year. If you have a big project, (Or several) that charge is cheap, assuming that Angies list is unbiased. It turns out that they are charging both the consumer and the contractor for the service. Kind of a classical conflict of interest..

We are not happy or unhappy with the service, I just wanted to see if anyone else had a similar experience.

Rog

To answer the original question, we've now had all our windows done via a place we found through Angie's list. It was a toss-up between two companies that both had very good reviews. We're happy with the end result, but wish the other company had had the windows we wanted because while the installers were awesome, the estimator, final measurement and confirmation guy, and the folks I had to follow up with to replace a screen that got bent were massively uncommunicative and didn't return calls worth a darn.

We also used it to look for an architect to help us with the half-garage/half-carport conversion to two-car garage. We got two guys I liked quite well and one dingbat (who came very highly rated) who said our item was so simple that he didn't want to tell us his plan because we could just go hire a draftsman to complete it, so wanted $100 on the spot to give us the big secret. In the end, we went with an acquaintance of my girlfriend's who we didn't find on Angie's List, so I couldn't say for sure how the AL architects would have gone.

In the end, in the face of the cost of these sorts of projects, it's worth the fee to me just to get a bit more information. Haven't signed up yet for the "classic car" section, as I have nothing to farm out right now. Though with the issues I've had getting good custom exhaust work done, I may be adding that later.