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How to tell a restoration company from a lead reseller

Fifteen records were cut from this index after every website they published was fetched. Here are the three patterns that gave them away.

Page last updated: By The RestorationIndex Desk

Key facts

  1. 0115 records were removed from this index as lead resellers rather than restoration companies
  2. 02All 15 were decided by fetching the website each one published, not by guessing from the name
  3. 03Three patterns did the work: a parked page, a shared template, and no independent business
  4. 04The check takes about two minutes and you can run it before you call anyone

Why a directory has to do this at all

A lead reseller is not a restoration company. It advertises like one, answers the phone like one, then sells the call to whichever contractor is buying that day. You get a stranger with no accountability to the company you thought you rang, and the person who actually shows up has paid for the privilege and needs the job to be worth it.

They are easy to miss in a listings dataset, because a lead reseller has a business name, an address, a phone number and sometimes reviews. The only thing that reliably separates it from a real firm is what happens when you open the website it publishes. So that is what was done here: every website in the index was fetched and read.

Pattern one: the website is a parked page on a throwaway domain

Five records published a website on a cheap top-level domain and the page behind it was a hosting placeholder, or a page for an entirely different trade. One pointed at a drain-cleaning site. One pointed at a general contractor. One had no phone number on the page at all and a listed number with a Pennsylvania area code, on a business claiming to serve Pickering.

A real restoration firm that has worked the GTA for years has a website with its people on it, its trucks, its equipment and photographs of jobs it has finished. It does not have a placeholder.

Pattern two: seven businesses, one website

Seven records with seven different business names, seven different addresses and seven different phone numbers were publishing the same page. Same layout, same wording, same stock photographs, and the same hardcoded customer count sitting in the copy on every one of them, a number that no control site in the dataset carried.

One template across seven names is not seven companies. It is one operation, or one supplier selling the same site to several buyers, and either way the seven listings were describing something that does not exist seven times over.

Pattern three: nothing independent behind it

Three records had no independent business you could find at all: no separate premises, no separate staff, nothing that existed apart from the advertisement. Two of those three sat behind a bot challenge that nothing could get past, so nothing about them could be confirmed either way.

They were cut anyway, and that decision is recorded as reversible in this repository. An index whose whole claim is that these are real companies cannot publish one it was unable to check while cutting thirteen of its neighbours for failing the same check.

The two-minute version you can run yourself

Open the website the listing publishes. Not the directory page, the company's own site. Then ask four things. Does the page show this company specifically, its people, its trucks, its own finished work, or could it belong to any trade in any city? Does the address on the site match the address on the listing? Does the phone number on the site match the number you were about to call? And does the domain look like a business that intends to be here in five years?

Then ask the company directly for two recent local jobs and for proof of insurance. Nothing on this site is a substitute for that. RestorationIndex ranks on one published score and does not verify a contractor's WSIB coverage, liability insurance, certification or licences, which is set out in full on the methodology page.

Keep reading

Check a company before you call it

Every profile on RestorationIndex carries the hours the firm posts, its public Google review record and a quote request.

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