Building Management · 10-07-2026

How to Vet Contractors Your Building Can Rely On

To vet a contractor for your building, check four things in this order: that they are licensed and insured for the work, that other buildings will vouch for them, that their quote describes the same job you asked for, and that the payment terms leave them with a reason to finish. Most bad contractor stories trace back to skipping one of those four. The rest of this guide expands each step and adds the habits that separate committees who have "our electrician" from committees who start from zero every time something breaks.

Licences and insurance come first, and not as a formality

For regulated trades, ask for the licence before you discuss price. Electrical work, lift maintenance and gas installations are licensed trades in Cyprus, and hiring unlicensed labour for them is not a bargain but a liability that lands on whoever commissioned the work. For general building work, ask instead for proof of liability insurance: a contractor whose ladder goes through a resident's windscreen, or whose grinder starts a fire, must have somewhere for that claim to go other than the building's own funds.

Neither request offends a professional. The ones who take offence are self-selecting out of your shortlist, which is the check working as intended.

References from buildings, not from friends

A recommendation from another management committee or building manager is worth five from private homeowners. Buildings are a different kind of client: the contractor must coordinate access with residents, tolerate being questioned at a general meeting, invoice a committee rather than a person, and come back under warranty two years later. Someone who tiles a private bathroom beautifully may still be a poor fit for replacing a lobby floor over a week of resident complaints.

When you call a reference, ask three concrete questions: did the final bill match the quote, did they return when something needed fixing after payment, and would the building hire them again for a bigger job. The pause before the third answer tells you most of what you need.

Make the quotes comparable, or comparing them is theatre

Three quotes are only useful when all three price the same job. Write a short scope, even five lines, and send the same text to every contractor: what is included, what materials, who removes the debris, what the deadline is. Without this, the cheapest quote is usually the one that quietly excluded the scaffolding, and the committee discovers the real price after the work has started and the leverage is gone.

Our honest advice after seeing many of these play out: the cheapest quote is the most expensive decision a committee makes, more often than any other single mistake. Price the middle, weight the references.

Payment terms are your only real leverage

Keep them boring and standard: a modest deposit if materials must be bought, staged payments tied to visible progress for longer jobs, and a meaningful final payment released only when the work is done and checked. Never pay in full up front, whatever discount is offered for it. A contractor who has been paid everything has one incentive left, and it is not your snag list.

Put the agreed scope, price and dates in writing, even if that is one email that both sides confirm. It is not about distrust; it is about the fact that in six months neither side will remember the verbal version the same way.

Start small, then let them earn the big jobs

The best vetting is a small real job. Give the new plumber the dripping tap in the common WC before the riser replacement; give the new painter the storeroom before the facade. Small jobs reveal punctuality, tidiness, invoicing habits and how they treat residents, at a price where a bad outcome is a lesson rather than a crisis.

Keep score, per contractor, over the years

The committee's memory is its real vetting system. Which contractor answered on a Sunday during the flood, which one's "warranty visit" took four phone calls, what the lift company actually charged against what it quoted: these facts decide the next hire better than any new round of references. But they live in the head of whoever was on the committee at the time, and committees change.

Write them down as they happen, attached to the building and to the contractor. That running record is exactly what Folio keeps: every job, call, invoice and complaint linked to the contractor entity across all your buildings, so the answer to "have we used this one before, and how did it go" is one search instead of one shrug.