Maintenance callouts your owner can trust without being here
TrustedTrades books electricians and plumbers with the payment held in escrow instead of going straight to the tradesman. The owner’s money only moves after the job is confirmed done, and the whole exchange stays in writing.
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.
Payment happens on trust
The owner pays a tradesman up front or on completion, with nothing holding the money if the work turns out wrong.
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 the money moves
Owner pays in
Through PayFast, into escrow
We hold it
The tradesman cannot touch it
Job confirmed
The client confirms it is done
We release
Payout follows that confirmation
To be exact about the last step: when the client confirms the job, the payment is marked for payout and we release it to the tradesman. A person on our side does that release, so a disputed job can be stopped before the money leaves.
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 payment and the confirmation 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. We take 10% of the job value from the tradesman, minimum R75, deducted when the escrow is released. The owner pays the price they agreed with the tradesman and not a cent more.
Where this actually is right now
TrustedTrades is new and it is launching in Potchefstroom only. The site is built and the escrow 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.