Are marketplace platforms better for finding quality lawn care than traditional methods?

Are marketplace platforms better for finding quality lawn care than traditional methods?

It’s always been a challenge for homeowners to find reliable lawn care service. Previously, it required calling individual companies directly, asking about their availability, and getting quotes. This traditional method is time-consuming, expensive, and often results in disappointment.

Today, marketplace platforms are the preferred way to find a landscaping company. They’re quick, reliable, and affordable. Homeowners of all kinds are using these platforms to take care of their lawn care needs, but how much better are they truly? We compare hiring time, pricing transparency, reliability, and payment terms below.

Time to hire: Marketplace vs calling service providers

It defeats the purpose of hiring a landscaping business if it takes weeks to get service. Hiring time is one of the most significant differences between traditional hiring methods and online marketplaces.

When you find a local lawn care company on Google and call them, you might get an answering machine. Unless the business is large with a dedicated sales team, the lawn care pros are busy with customers. Popular lawn care professionals can be booked weeks out in advance, especially during the peak mowing season. Even if you do get a call back, you might have to wait a while.

Online lawn care hiring services are much quicker. Once you post your property, you’ll get multiple bids on-demand. There are many full time contractors on these platforms who are ready to work, and you may even be able to hire a mower for next-day service.

This is important because lawns grow fast, especially in southern climates. For example, by the time you’re interested in hiring someone for Atlanta lawn mowing, your grass is already past the point of needing to be cut. If it takes days or weeks to get lawn maintenance, your grass might be much longer, resulting in higher costs.

Pricing transparency: Clear pricing or hidden fees?

After mowing services are completed, no one wants to hear that it’s going to cost more than they originally thought. Unfortunately, this sort of pricing miscommunication is common with traditional hiring methods.

When you call a lawn care business, you’ll get a general estimate. Many times, these businesses require an on-site visit before mowing lawns to provide a more accurate quote. If you skip this step, you could be surprised by how much the lawn mowing costs once they’ve arrived to complete the job. Sometimes there’s also hidden fees. These could include:

• Material markup costs for premium landscaping materials that you were sneakily sold.

• Disposal fees for lawn clippings, leaf removal, dead branches, or other clean up debris.

• Contract initiation fees when you sign up for bi-weekly or weekly service.

With a lawn care app, you never have these concerns. Lawn care pros give accurate bids based on your property details and ask questions ahead of time, such as how long your grass is. The price that you’re quoted is the price that you’ll pay. In addition, there’s never any need to set up an on-site estimate like with traditional hiring.

Reliability is a top concern of lawn care customers. You want to make sure that the person you’re hiring for the job is fully qualified and that they’ll show up on time. You don’t always get this level of certainty when you hire a company over the phone.

Although most consumers can still check out the reviews of a lawn care company before they call, these reviews are not always accurate. On platforms like Yelp, reviews are commonly bought or fake. On Google, it’s possible that people were incentivized or asked to leave reviews. A single five-star rating may not have been tied to a job at all.

Furthermore, reviews say nothing about how often a company shows up on time. Unfortunately, cancellations, delays, and no-shows are common with some landscape design and lawn mowing contractors. Rain, overbooked schedules, and disorganization often lead to missed appointments.

On apps like GreenPal, homeowners get access to a “reliability rating.” This rating displays the percentage of times a lawn care pro has completed their job on time. With an average on-time rating of 93.15%, you can feel confident that your pro will show up when they say they will.

Payment protection: Never get scammed

Home improvement scams are something every homeowner worries about. Many people want some level of financial protection when hiring a contractor to ensure their money isn’t wasted. They don’t want to pay for service only to be ghosted or receive poor quality service.

There’s no real way to protect your money when you hire someone over the phone. If you don’t like the service, they’ll still expect you to pay for it. Some providers even require upfront seasonal contracts, so you could be stuck paying for unsatisfactory work all summer long.

A main feature of GreenPal is payment protection and dispute resolution. If you do not receive the high-quality lawn care you were promised, you have until midnight the day the pictures were uploaded to file an official dispute on the app.

How to decide if traditional hiring or marketplaces are right for you

Find hassle free, vetted lawn care service with GreenPal

Traditional hiring methods can be time-consuming, expensive, and unreliable. With online marketplaces, however, homeowners can quickly get the dependable service they need without any catch. 

To sign up, all you need is a credit card and your property address. There’s no need to search for local phone numbers or compare endless Google reviews. Input your property, and you’ll immediately start getting bids for your lawn care. Get started today to get the quality lawn care you need.