Maintenance callouts your owner can trust without being here
TrustedTrades gives you electricians and plumbers whose trade registration a person has checked, with the whole job on record in one chat: the messages, the agreed price, the booking, the completion and the review.
It costs the agency and the owner nothing.
What we built this for
Potch is full of houses rented to students whose owners live somewhere else. Every maintenance callout on one of those houses asks the same three awkward questions.
The owner is not in Potch
A tenant reports a burst geyser. The owner has to approve a cost for work they cannot inspect, on the word of a student.
Who is this tradesman?
Your usual guy is booked up, so someone gets a number from a friend. Nobody has checked whether he is registered for the trade.
The proof lives in WhatsApp
Quotes, photos and approvals sit in someone’s phone. When the owner asks what they paid for, you go digging.
How a job runs
Message a tradesman
In the app chat, and agree the price
Send a booking
He accepts, and the booking is confirmed
He does the job
Marks when he arrives and when it is done
You confirm
Leave a review, or report a problem
To be exact about the money: the owner pays the tradesman directly, at the price agreed in the chat. We never hold or touch it. If something is wrong with the work, you can report a problem within 48 hours of the job being marked done, and it is recorded on the job.
What “verified” means here
You would be putting our tradesman into a client’s house, so the badge has to mean something you can check yourself.
Plumbers: proof of PIRB registration
The Plumbing Industry Registration Board runs a public lookup. The plumber submits proof of PIRB registration and a person reviews it before the profile goes live. You can check a plumber’s registration yourself at pirb.co.za.
Electricians: wireman’s licence on file
We check the registration that lets them issue a Certificate of Compliance. Being straight with you: there is no public self-serve registry for that number, so this check is the document seen by a person, not a registry confirmation.
Everything in writing
Messages, the agreed price, the booking, the completion and the review all sit on the job itself. When an owner asks what they paid for six months later, it is on one page instead of in someone’s WhatsApp history.
You keep the relationship
Your team and the tradesman talk to each other directly in the platform’s chat. There is no call centre and nobody relaying messages between you.
What it costs
Nothing for the agency and nothing for the owner. No listing fee, no subscription, no markup added to the quote, and we take no cut from the tradesman either. The owner pays the tradesman directly, the price they agreed and not a cent more.
Already have a guy?
Keep him. Use us when he is busy, or for a registered trade you cannot vouch for yourself. It costs you nothing to have checked tradesmen on hand.
Where this actually is right now
TrustedTrades is new and it is launching in Potchefstroom only. The site is built and the booking flow works. The first Potch electricians and plumbers are being signed up and checked this month, so the directory is still filling up, and no completed jobs have run through it yet.
You are reading that on purpose. If an early agency tells us what a maintenance callout actually needs, that is what gets built next.