Unethical ID Recommendations

We don’t comment on other renovation platforms, for obvious reasons, but a recent sharing by one of our homeowners absolutely infuriated us. This is why reliability issues still plague the industry even with these “top recommendations” by “best platforms”.

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The homeowner enquired with this reno platform and got a few “recommendations”.

She then did a background check on all these companies, and shockingly found that they all belonged to the same parent company.

In other words, the platform under the guise of recommendations, in fact only referred 1 company.

We are not privy to the economic incentives given by the parent company to the platform. But it is clear that:

• The parent company had somehow managed to list multiple subsidiaries as if they were entirely separate firms

• The renovation platform allowed it

• They pushed these IDs to the homeowner as if they were giving a range of fair, unbiased recommendations.

If the owner did not do the due diligence, they would not have known. And if it happened to one owner, you wonder how many got the same “recommendations”?

This is clearly inethical and a conflict of interest.

Here’s the hard truth that homeowners might not know - many renovation platforms are actually run by ID firms themselves , or IDs with their own firms.

You either end up with “ownself refer ownself” or “refer all who pay me”, which is unfair to homeowners.

You either monopolise the “good leads”, or get other ID firms to pay for poor quality leads, which is unfair to IDs.

That is why the renovation industry is stuck in a circular rut.

We are not claiming to be saints here at Deconstruct, nor are we running a charity. But hand to heart, we’ve always done our best to keep things transparent, ethical, and fair for both IDs & homeowners.

As shared, we don’t usually comment on how other reno platforms operate (for obvious reasons), but this situation? It crosses the line.

Homeowners deserve to know this. Always do your due diligence. A recommendation is only valuable if it comes with integrity behind it.

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