The calamity of construction cowboys is spreading, and honest tradies are missing out on job opportunities. San Williams looks at how the industry can best take arms against these common outlaws.

Everyone likes a bargain, and when it comes to building or renovating, landing a great-priced service is always boastworthy to friends and family. For customers, the process of finding someone for the job seems relatively simple. After contacting that tradie recommended by a friend, getting a quote together and making the deposit, it should only be a matter of time until another vision of the Australian life is realised.

This wasn’t the case for young couple Virgil Tirris and Izabela Kupniewska, who recently set up a GoFundMe following their renovation nightmare.

In February 2022 Virgil and Izabela bought their Loch Sport residence with plans to build their dream home, and after hiring Darcy Wheildon of Weildons Excavation & Home Maintenance, works to renovate the building proceeded a month later.

Things began taking a turn when Darcy was found to be unregistered not long after and no building permit was put in place. By June, the Willington Shire Council issued a stop-work order.

“He was saying he was a part of Victorian Building Authority (VBA), and I just didn’t think to check, this is my first renovation,” Virgil says.

“Darcy was saying I didn’t need a permit because I wasn’t going 3m from the existing structure, and that’s not correct. Once we got the stop work order, we got a building surveyor out and he said that 95% of his actual work wasn’t to standard.”

The building would go on to be declared dangerous by an Illegal Building Works report, with entry prohibited until the building was made safe. Overall, the couple had spent close to $70,000 on their home which is currently facing demolition.

“It’s heart-breaking. I feel like an idiot like it’s my fault. I keep looking back and thinking I should have recognised something wasn’t right.”

Overcharging customers, doing a dodgy/non-compliant job and not looking after the safety of their workers, ‘construction cowboys’ have always seemed the way in the building industry. But as stories of burned homeowners continue to make headlines, a report has now revealed its trickle-down effect on businesses and qualified workers.

A national survey of tradies business decision makers from Australia’s largest tradie marketplace, hipages, shows over a quarter (29%) of tradies have missed out on jobs due to unlicensed and under-qualified competitors.

Furthermore, over a third (36%) have had to complete remediation work left by construction cowboys in the past six months.

“There have always been rumblings from tradies that they’re competing with cowboys ’in the market, but when you start to look at the data and the survey results, it’s a bit of an eye-opener and something needs to be done,” hipages customer experience advisor Donna Hole says.

“Customers don’t always know what licensing requirements are needed from tradies to do the work. But on the tradies’ side, things like online presence could be improved, with lots of consumers trusting what they read online and relying on trust views and recommendations.”

Donna says there could be a mix of causes to their latest report numbers, one of them being the rising cost of living. She places a lack of consumer knowledge or education as the key factor in the issue that needs to be considered.

“We can’t rely on the consumer to know what they need to do beforehand, therefore we must educate everybody,” she says.

To help set themselves apart and increase their job intake, Donna says there are a few simple measures tradies can take.

For instance, putting qualifications in front of the customer at every communication point and showing them where they can see those reviews and their complete work can show how professional they are, particularly when the customer is comparing them against another tradie. An unqualified cowboy’s website or list of projects looks quite bare or blank in comparison according to Donna.

Platforms like hipages assist with this, taking care of the online presence and social side by providing the tradie with a profile page for potential customers to view and see their recommendations, reviews, qualifications and other information.

Additionally, the number of qualified tradies missing out on job opportunities has also affected tradie prices. Around 38% of tradies claim to have dropped their service prices to compete with unlicensed and underqualified tradies according to the hipages research.

“It puts the legitimate trade people in a difficult spot and quite often, there’ll be an undercut because people, who haven’t gone through the right gateway feel like they can probably charge less for that work and then gain a commercial advantage,” VBA executive director compliance and enforcement David Black says.

“What we’ve encouraged qualified tradies to do where possible is to continue reporting through to the VBA where they’re observing work that they believe has been done by unregistered people.”

David reminds us that any work that can be regulated by the VBA can be reported for them to investigate, with the VBA recently prosecuting an unregistered builder in the Moorabbin Magistrates Court.

Westley Buhagiar was working on a Caulfield property before he was found and charged without registration in the required category of the domestic builder, without insurance or the necessary permit and, in February, was convicted and fined $12,500 for the offences under the Building Act 1993.

Though the VBA intercepts cases where possible, David says one of the difficulties with unregistered work is that it typically falls under the radar, with only the consumer and construction cowboy the only people aware of it taking place.

“These jobs are out of the line of sight of regulators we often rely on consumers reporting them, and by then, it’s usually too late because the work has been done, something’s gone wrong and they’re faced with a significant bill to get it fixed up,” he says.

To assist them, David says the VBA’s online ‘Find a Practitioner’ search engine allows people to enter a name, registration or license number and look to whether the plumber or builder is registered with the VBA and what classes they’re able to conduct work.

Also included on the website is the ‘Disciplinary Register’. This database lays out any specific disciplinary outcomes or prosecutions that the VBA may have initiated against a person, providing another means to check background information on someone they’re proposing to engage with for a job.

Finding the right tradie for a new build or renovation shouldn’t be a difficult process and often, the customer can still get it at a price that they can be proud of if all the appropriate measures are taken.

Unfortunately, construction cowboys are so prevalent in the industry and possibly the most frustrating element is that the honest tradies can only do so much to remedy the issue. It’s on customers to do their due diligence.

Despite this, the best thing tradies can do is prove that they’re doing everything by the book, speak to clients, explain the cowboy issue plaguing the industry and help them make the right choice the first time.