Reviews for Builders
You don’t need more reviews. You need this year’s
The volume problem no other trade has
A single storey extension is £19,450. A dormer loft conversion, £17,200. A garden room, £12,850. A garage conversion, £5,900. An internal wall removal with an RSJ, £2,750.
Now count the jobs. Eight to twelve a year, if you are busy. A plumber does that in a fortnight.
That is the review problem for builders, and it is the opposite of everyone else’s. A decorator can gather fifty reviews a year without trying. You have twelve opportunities, total, and if you convert half of them you are adding six a year. Six.
Which means every single one matters enormously, and the usual advice — ask more, ask often — is close to useless. You cannot ask more. There is nobody else to ask.
What a builder’s review has to carry
Because you have so few, each has to do more work. A homeowner spending £19,450 and giving up their kitchen for three months is making one of the largest decisions of their year, and they will read every review you have, slowly.
What they are looking for, in order: did the price hold, did the programme hold, and what was it like living there. Those are the three fears. A review that addresses all three is worth twenty that say “excellent work, highly recommended”.
You will not get that by asking for “a review”. You get it by asking a question: “If you get a chance, it really helps future customers if you mention how we handled the price and the timescale — those are the two things everyone worries about.”
That single sentence is the difference between a profile of pleasantries and a profile that closes jobs.
The ratio
An extension is £19,450. Our Booked package is £99 a month — £1,188 a year. One extension covers over sixteen years.
Put another way: if a properly run review process wins you one extra extension across the next decade, it has paid for itself many times over. Given that a builder with four recent, detailed reviews beats one with fifteen old vague ones in almost every comparison, that is not a demanding bar.
What we’d actually do
Ask at handover, then again at three months. The handover review is about the build. The three-month review is about whether it stayed right — no cracks, no leaks, no snags outstanding. That second one is enormously persuasive and virtually nobody collects it.
Ask for the two fears by name. Price and programme. Every time.
Collect the referral at the same moment. Builders are hired on recommendation more than any other trade here. The handover conversation is the moment to ask who else they know, and it should be a habit rather than an afterthought.
Reply at length. You have twelve reviews; you can afford to write a proper reply to each. A reply that mentions the specifics of the build reads as a builder who remembers his jobs.
Put them next to the photographs. A review under the before-and-after of that exact job is worth several times the same review sitting alone on Google.
What good looks like at six months
- A review from most completed jobs, which for a builder means four to six
- At least two mentioning price holding and programme holding
- One or two three-month follow-ups
- Every one replied to properly
- Reviews paired with the photographs of the same job on your site
The mistakes we see most
Not asking, because the relationship was long and it feels awkward. It is far less awkward than you think after three months in someone’s house, and they are usually pleased to be asked.
Asking with an open question. “Leave us a review” gets three words. Name the two fears.
Letting the profile go a year without a new one. For a low-volume trade this is the real risk, and it is why the three-month follow-up matters — it doubles your opportunities without needing more jobs.
Only collecting from the perfect jobs. The build where the drain was in the wrong place and you dealt with it is the most persuasive review you will ever get.
Where this lands in Gaffer
The handover request fires off job completion and the three-month one is scheduled at the same time, so the follow-up actually happens rather than being remembered in April.
Reviews sit against the job record with its photographs, so the gallery entry and the customer’s words stay together — which is exactly how they should appear on the site.
Referrals get recorded against the customer who gave them, so the source of your work becomes visible rather than anecdotal.
The first ninety days
Weeks 1-2. We set two requests per job rather than one: at handover, and again at three months. That single change doubles the number of opportunities a low-volume trade has without needing a single extra job.
Weeks 3-6. We write the prompt so it names the two fears – did the price hold, did the programme hold – because an open request produces three polite words and a specific one produces the paragraph that closes the next extension.
Weeks 7-12. We go back to the jobs you finished last year and ask now. A customer who has lived in an extension for a full winter can say something no fresh handover review can, and no builder ever asks. We also pair each review with the photographs of that build on your site.
At ninety days the measure is whether the reviews mention money and time. A profile of “lovely people, very tidy” does not sell a £19,450 job; a profile that says the price held does.
Referrals come from the same conversation
Builders are hired on recommendation more than any trade on this site, and the handover is the moment that recommendation is most likely to be given.
Somebody who has just had their house finished, is pleased with it, and is about to have every neighbour and relative through the door over the following month is the single best referral source you will ever have – and the window is short. Six weeks later the novelty has gone and so has the conversation.
So the handover request does two jobs. It asks for the review, and it asks, plainly, whether they know anyone else planning something. Recorded properly, that turns one extension into the two or three that typically follow it down the same street.
It is also why the three-month follow-up matters twice over: it catches the referral conversation a second time, once the neighbours have actually seen the finished work.
Questions builders ask
Is twelve reviews enough? If the top three are recent and detailed, easily. Homeowners read depth, not volume.
What if a job overran? Ask anyway, and ask them to be honest. A review that says it ran two weeks over and the builder absorbed it is worth more than silence.
Should I ask architects and site contacts too? Yes, separately. Their reviews carry weight with the commercial work that homeowners never see.
Three months feels like a long time to wait. It is, which is why nobody does it, which is why it works.
See what we'd do for builders
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