MyBuilder

Makes life so much easier having tradesmen coming to you. Reviews and photos of the work really help.

Hi I will demonstrate in a few short paragraphs that the reviews on sitejabber for MyBuilder (henceforth MB) are fake.

1. I have worked on jobs and hired people from MB. The site is far from perfect, the prices are outrageous especially for smaller jobs. As a contractor you pay a fee (£7-£60) only if a customer shortlists you, therefore you will pay and compete at the same time. Maybe that makes you play nice with the customer, but it also makes you hike your prices - no, not to adjust to the fee, but to the adjust to the hundreds of £ you lose when shortlisted.

2. "If something is free, you're not the customer, you're the product". Builders get favoured, especially ones with a lot of feedback or older accounts (signalling to MB that these workmen pay their fees). Negative reviews can disappear.

3. The background checks are non-existant, never have been. Recently they started ID verifying, but other than that you still don't know who you're getting. Why not try Gumtree or the Yellow pages? At least it'll be cheaper.

4. There's no customer service for anybody. No phone number, just a form they promise to get back to you.

With the above in mind, how often do you find yourself coming to a 3rd party site (such as sitejabber), after hiring a person from another site (MB), to leave one and only one positive review?
Are you really in-love with sites such as MB that you'd go out of your way coming here to leave a positive review? Chances are slim. They're much higher if you were upset for example, because you would want to vent your frustration and warn people.
Yet surprisingly here most 5 star reviews here are single review accounts, they went out of their way to say how spectacular MB is! Don't be naive, these people have had to write a review for the contractor on MB.
And if by chance they were genuine, it would mean they enjoy writing reviews, which doesn't explain why they all have 1 review. That's because it's not true.

You have been warned folks, MB is not interested in anyone except the owners of MB and they will lie to you here if necessary.

Where to start? I posted a job on MyBuilder.com. I had a leaking kitchen tap, a bathroom tap whose washer needed replacing and a hard-to-flush toilet. Plus my boiler needed servicing.
I got a response very quickly and looked up the persons profile and reviews. He had 100% positive feedback from over 100 reviews, so I thought he seemed ideal.
He did replace the tap washers satisfactorily and stuck a gas-monitoring probe in the boiler flue (but didnt do much else with the boiler). He then cleaned the magnetic filter attached to the piping beside the hot water tank. Since then there has been a small leak coming from the piping, but this is the least of my worries!
This is the moment when it turns into a horror movie... The Toilet (rated 18; contains scenes of very bad language and severe emotional stress, coupled with thoughts of plumbercide)
Had I known it was just the diaphragm in the siphon that had got a tear in it I would have been tempted to try to do the job myself - oh, the brilliant irony of hindsight! - after all I couldnt have made a worse job if it than the so-called plumber did.
Basically, he took a functioning, slightly-temperamental, toilet and has left me with a leaking, no-can-use toilet with an unsecured cistern. He actually got me to go out to a plumber merchant and buy a replacement siphon diaphragm as the new siphon he thought would fit the cistern didnt. What a trusting mug I was. He replaced the flush (which was fine) with another that was too high for the cistern and propped up the cistern lid with a lump of blu-tac. Great if youre going for the asymmetrical, this-toilet-should-be-in-a-skip look. Not so great if you actually want a functioning toilet that works.
In summary if I were you I would avoid MyBuilder.com at all costs.