Nashville Home Improvement Help

Selling a home in this market requires a lot of patience and compromise. You must negotiate on price and list your home on the market for months. The slow in home sales has convinced many folks in Nashville and Middle Tennessee to just sit this season out and focus on making their home more pleasant to live in and increase its future value.

Kermit Baker, a research fellow at Harvard University’s Joint Center for Housing Studies says, “There is a lot of attractiveness to thinking about staying put and making changes to the current home.”

While the Harvard research group says they are expecting remodeling spending to decline this year, there is likely to be a large group of homeowners that will invest in home improvement anyway, especially with the economic stimulus checks coming in.

For many, do-it-yourself home improvement is not an attractive or practical option, and finding the right contractor to do the work can be challenging. Nobody wants to marry the first pretty girl (or guy) that walks by, but it’s also a huge hassle to call 4-5 handymen in your area, have them by to look at the job, and then give you a quote.

“There are many improvements I would love to make for my home, but the process of bidding the job usually seems like too much trouble, ” says Kathy Bennett of East Nashville.

Many people feel the same way that Bennett does: its a hassle to find a trustworthy contractor who will give you an honest price. What you may not know is that there are new services available that have revolutionized this process by allowing you post your job online and get competitive bids from contractors. The two most prominent of these online services are BidClerk & BeaverBids. While BidClerk is funded by contractor charges, BeaverBids is a free community that requires no fees, and furthermore they offer a greater degree of consumer identity protection during the bidding process.

The process of posting a job online is as easy as creating an account, taking some photos of your property, and making a few measurements. BeaverBids allows contractors to post bids on your job without knowing your identity. You can contact them anytime by calling their number, or you can use the convenient “request a contact” that alerts the contractor to call you at a particular time. The service is free at all times for everyone, and with a growing community of contractors in the Nashville area, there’s really no reason not to try it.

Right now is a great time to remodel because the labor pool has less activity, and thus you can get more competitive bids from contractors!