3 smoke and mirrors to watch out for in renovation
The industry is extremely grey with many marketing “gimmicks”, so do watch out for some of these!
Watch our tiktok video on this if you lazy to read.
1) Renovation Packages
This is hands-down one of the biggest pitfall to watch out for.
Often, renovation firms will market themselves to be extremely cheap with these renovation packages. For example, $8,888 for 4 room BTO, or the countless variation of this.
It is almost, never, ever possible for it to be this price.
Every house should be one’s dream house, renovated at a reasonable price. Such packages do not afford any customisation, and often include many hidden T&Cs. For example, you might think that flooring of whole house means literally the whole house. But after signing the package, many firms will tell u “oh, this excludes service yard etc.”
The end result, based on the face-to-face survey that we do with homeowners, is a much higher renovation cost, with a lot of frustration and anger, and a shoddier workmanship at the end of the day.
Our strong advice: Do not go for any packages.
2) Renovation Freebies
Many firms & platforms also claim to offer freebies and lottery chances to win something if they renovate with them.
Don’t get us wrong, this in itself has absolutely nothing wrong. However, the intention behind it is often questionable.
The issue we increasingly see is how companies use this to reel customers in, but end up charging a much higher price than required.
For example, firms may give “free epoxy tiling works worth $1,000”. But they may end up charging homogenous tiles beyond $20 psf, which is at least 20% higher than required.
Such firms tend to end up becoming more expensive than others. Over time, this builds up a false impression that renovation is extremely expensive, when there might be some profiteering involved used to fund these marketing “gimmicks”.
3) Casetrust
A casetrust-accreditated firm is a good-to-have. But let’s be clear, it does not guarantee a good renovation experience.
We need to be clear on what Casetrust governs. Casetrust ensures that firms do not run away with customers’ money as they are required to buy a bond.
No doubt, this is important.
But this is just one of the many important criteria of a good renovation firm.
Other areas such as having good communication, reasonable pricing, strong business ethics etc are not a guarantee.
And we speak from experience ourselves.
There are certainly good casetrust-accreditated firms, but there are many non-casetrust-accreditated firms that deliver good/better experiences.
Hence, we do not think that it is a good litmus test. We will deep-dive into Casetrust in a further post.
But at the end of the day we believe that, word-of-mouth, or homeowners’ reviews are still the most telling, and this is what we build our platform upon.