Tips for Hiring a Contractor

Home Inspection Tips

Tips for Real Estate Agents

Finding qualified contractors to perform work on your house is often an intimidating task. Most consumers have some level of fear and doubt as to choosing someone who will show up and finish a given project when they say they will and for the price agreed upon.

Luckily, Oregon has a very good Construction Contractor’s Board (CCB) whose sole purpose is to protect consumers and provide them with tools to select contractors with a proven history of good work practices.

All contractors in Oregon are required to display a registration number (typically, called a CCB#) on all bids, advertisements and business cards. This number may seem like a small thing but is actually a very powerful tool. In just a few minutes this number can give you a detailed history of a contractor’s business practices and alert you to any problems they’ve had in the past.

The Oregon Construction Contractor’s Board website has a very user friendly search function that allows you to enter a CCB number, a business name or a contractor’s name to be directed to their information.

The following is the link: Oregon CCB License Search

Once you’ve located the contractor you are researching you can see how long they’ve been in business, make sure their insurance and bond are current and look into any disputes they’ve had in the past.

In addition to using a contractor’s CCB number to check their history you an also tell just by looking at the number how long they’ve been in business. The lower the number the longer they’ve been registered. Current registration numbers are around 200,000. As an example, Crawford Inspection Services’ CCB# is 76914 and we’ve been registered for around 20 years.

There’s no promise a given contractor will be perfect but selecting one that has a good, long history in business is much more likely to return good results. Almost every horror story on the news about fraudulent contractors could have been avoided by first checking their history through Oregon’s Construction Contractor Board.