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About Porch.com

By J.R. Duren

HighYa Staff

Updated on: May 30, 2018

Porch is an online marketplace for homeowners where you can post projects for the purpose of getting bids from contractors or hiring a Porch Service pro to perform work at your house.

The company is based in Seattle and was founded in 2012, then launched in 2013. The company’s two founders are Matt Ehrlichman and Ronnie Castro.

Ehrlichman, the company’s CEO spent around five years at ACTIVE Network, a marketplace for activities and events. Castro, the company’s VP or Customer Operations, previously worked at Google, Expedia and Wild Tangent before helping found Porch.

The hallmarks of Porch’s website is a combination of their Porch Pro contractors and Porch Services, along with a pair of guarantees that, in qualifying situations, can protect you in the event that your contractor doesn’t follow through on their work or your home is damaged during the project.

Over the course of this review, we’ll provide you our insights about the various features of the website, as well as talk about some of the fine print we think you should know when you head to their site to find a contractor.

We’ll also do a quick comparison of what Porch and other homeowner-focused contracting sites so that you can get an idea of how the site fares against the competition.

At the end of our review, we’ll wrap up with our thoughts on Porch.com’s strengths and weaknesses.

Porch.com’s Contractor Options: Porch Pros and Porch Services

As we mentioned in the introduction of this review, Porch provides two main types of contractors: Porch Services and Porch Pro.

Porch Services

This part of the website is dedicated to handyman services and contractors who come to your home to perform work.

What makes these contractors different than Porch Pro contractors is that you can schedule, book and pay for their services through Porch.com, whereas with Porch Pros you post a project on the site, get bids from contractors and then book and pay for those contractors on your own, away from Porch.com.

At the time of publishing, Porch Services offered handyman and contractor help in 40 different areas, with each of those areas featuring its own subset of different jobs and projects.

We wanted to get a sense of what the Porch Services booking engine was like, so we gave it a test run. After entering our area code, we said we needed cabinet installation. Porch quickly gave us a quote: $249 for cabinet installation.

Porch Quote. Credit: Porch.com

From there, Porch asked us to pick a time and date for the service and then requested our address and contact information.

Once you finish this process, a Home Assistant from Porch will contact you to finalize the details of your appointment. Their booking engine’s fine print notes that your Porch Services Pro will contact you the day of your appointment to confirm that they’re on their way.

Important Reminders About Porch Services

Booking your appointment is a simple process. There are, however, a few things you need to remember as you prepare to have your Porch Services pro come to your home.

First, you can cancel your appointment for free as long as you do it at least 24 hours before the time at which the contractor was supposed to arrive.

If, for some reason, the job takes longer than Porch estimated, their fine print says that you’ll be charged an hourly fixed rate for the additional time it took.

Background Checks

All professionals who participate in the Porch Services program are background-checked and, according to a Porch rep with whom we spoke, agree to “carry the licensing and insurance applicable to the service and location.”

The Porch Services Satisfaction Promise

One of the advantages of using Porch Services is that contractors hired through this program are backed by a property protection guarantee and a quality guarantee (“Satisfaction Promise”).

This is a key factor because competing sites Thumbtack and HomeAdvisor offer a property protection guarantee (more on that later) but don’t cover the quality of the work performed by contractors you hire via listings on their site.

Now, in order to properly file a claim through the Satisfaction Promise program, you need to do a couple of things ahead of time.

First, you have to file a claim within 15 days of the work being completed. The claim needs to include three important pieces of information, a Porch representative told us:

• A written statement detailing which parts of the completed work you aren’t happy with
• Photos of the unsatisfactory work
• A statement telling Porch how you want the situation resolved

Porch notes that their goal is to have the same contractor come back and do the job right, so handle your claim with tact. You don’t want to burn your bridges with the contractor before he or she has a chance to return to your home and correct the mistake(s) .

If it’s not possible to send out the original contractor, Porch will provide you with a replacement professional to fix the mistakes.

Another important factor here is that Porch will only cover work that was paid for by debit or credit card through their site. Additional services performed by the contractor that you pay for in cash aren’t covered.

Porch’s fine print also states that you can ask for a reimbursement of your original payment if the redone job still doesn’t satisfy you.

The work done by the Porch Services pro is also covered by the site’s Property Protection, which we’ll address in the next section.

Porch Pros

The second way to book contractors via Porch is through Porch Pros. This portal differs from Porch Services because you aren’t booking and paying for services through Porch.

Rather, you post a project that you need done in your home and contractors who’ve signed up with Porch will send you quotes for the work that you describe.

While the profiles of these professionals may list licenses, it’s important that you verify that the contractor is licensed because Porch does not check the backgrounds of Porch Pros.

When you’ve looked through the quotes and decided on a contractor, all booking and payments take place outside of Porch. Porch Services, on the other hand, is an in-house service.

Because of this, the work that’s done on your home isn’t covered by the aforementioned Satisfaction Promise.

Porch Property Protection

However, you do get the site’s Property Protection, which is a program that’s designed to reimburse you up to $1,000 for any major damage done to your home at the hands of the contractor you hire.

Like the Satisfaction Promise, there are certain things you have to do to file your claim. First, Porch says that you’ll have to try and resolve the situation on your own before coming to them.

If that fails to resolve the problem, then you can file a claim as long as you meet the following criteria:

• Pro was booked via your project page
• You marked the pro “hired” on your project page
• You file your claim within 15 days of the completion of the job

You’ll have to provide proof of the damage – photos work – as well as “documentation showing the value of the damaged property,” their site says.

Things that aren’t covered by property protection are:

• Poor work quality
• Payment issues
• Damage done that was part of work done that wasn’t included in your original project posting

Porch.com’s Better Business Bureau Ratings

Porch gets an A+ grade from the BBB, a ranking that reflects 13 different aspects ranging from how the company interacts with the BBB and how it handles complaints from customers.

At the time of publishing, Porch received an average customer review of 4.2 stars, which is better than HomeAdvisor, Houzz, Angie’s List and Thumbtack.

Complaints about the company focused on Porch Pros who didn’t live up to their original agreement with the customer either because they charged more than they quoted or they didn’t do the work well.

How Porch.com Compares to Other Contractor Websites

We’ve compared five of the most popular sites for finding a contractor, – Porch included – and find that there are some distinct differences between Porch and its competitors.

First, Porch’s Better Business Bureau page has a higher average star-rating than HomeAdvisor, Angie’s List, Thumbtack and Houzz.

Second, Porch and Angie’s List are the only two sites that provide a guarantee for work quality. Angie’s List’s guarantee, however, is only available to users who pay for a yearly membership on the site.

Porch is the only site of the five who provides a free quality guarantee, although it’s important to note the guarantee is only valid for Porch Services and not Porch Pros.

As for background checks, based on our research we believe that homeowners will probably be most satisfied with HomeAdvisor because they run each contractor through two license verifications, sex offender registries, a national criminal registry and the court system.

While Porch, Thumbtack and Angie’s List’s background checks aren’t as extensive as HomeAdvisor’s, they do check the area that is critical to work quality: licensing.

You don’t want a contractor who doesn’t have a license. For all you know, they could be a random person pretending to be a contractor who will take your money and run.

When it comes to background checks, it’s important for you to do research on your own, though. Porch notes that even though they do license checks on their Porch Services contractors, homeowners should verify the validity of the contractor’s license.

Call your local government office to find out how to verify a license and check criminal backgrounds. Your state’s sex offender search can be found with a quick google search.

Another important thing to remember is that the background checks these sites do are only administered to the owner of the contracting business.

The owner’s employees and/or subcontractors are not checked. So, be sure to ask the contractor who is doing the work and if they are licensed. Feel free to inquire about criminal records, too.

Whichever the case, the general rule of thumb is that the homeowner should do research on their own to confirm that their contractor is licensed and has no criminal or sex offender history.

» For Further Reading: Finding a Home Contractor: A Guide to the Five Best Websites

The Final Word: Pros and Cons of Porch.com

Based on our research, we believe Porch’s greatest strengths are that it offers a double guarantee on work performed by contractors booked through Porch Services.

Your property is protected up to $1,000 for damages caused by the contractor and, in the event that he or she did a poor job, you have several options for making sure the job is done right.

Homeowners who’ve endured poor contracting jobs will most likely find this double protection to be a big relief.

The downside of the site are that they don’t perform background checks on contractors who bid on the projects you post. You’ll have to do the legwork of checking that their license is up-to-date and valid for the type of work they’re doing, as well as running their name through a background check, if you choose to do so.

Overall, we think Porch is among the best sites to find a contractor and that, based on our research, the best-case scenario for homeowners is to work through their Porch Services option to find a contractor that’s been vetted and whose work comes with a quality guarantee.