In the past week on Linkedin and Twitter there has been much conversation about home owners, our dealings with them, and discussion about whether they are becoming harder to deal with.

It was the inspiration for my latest poll on Twitter, where I asked the industry whether they though they had enough protection from home owners. That poll has now ended and these are the results.

Overwhelming

This was the question that was asked, and the results it got:

I don’t think anyone can dispute those results. If anything, I’m surprised that we didn’t get a result of over 90% against. Regardless, this is a clear message from the industry that it feels that it does not have enough protection against home owners who seek to make life difficult.

In recent years legislation have moved heavily towards protecting the home owner, giving them rights to the point of being able to condemn an installation of windows and doors just over a year old. Whilst consumer protection will always remain important, it does now appear that businesses have been given little cover in which to protect themselves from home owners who wish to do harm.

The little guys

For the very biggest companies in our industry, who have the people power and money to be able to easily cope with difficult customers, its the smaller installers that are at most risk from dodgy home owners.

It only takes a couple of bad customers to withhold large balancing payments from a small installer to put their cash flow under immense pressure. At that point, it becomes a risk that the company could go under should enough of that all important cash be withheld from them.

I highly doubt that any legislation is going to come forth in the coming years to actually restore some balance to things for business. So, all I can say at this point to installers is to make sure that your paperwork is as accurate as possible, is watertight when it comes to your terms and conditions, and give potential problem customers a few chances as possible to complain.

As always, another poll will be live on DGB soon!

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