Case studies
Three contractors, three lessons — what the public record would’ve shown before they mobilized.
Anonymized stories from contractors who took the bid and learned the lesson the hard way. Each one ties back to a category on the public-record check — late-pay history, walk-off dispute patterns, and recorded lien filings — and the red flag that would have shifted the math before mobilization.
$28,400 lost across two jobs on a $31k tile bid.
The job: a $31,000 kitchen + bath rewire on a tile bid.
A two-man electrical crew won a low-five-figure tile-subcontract on a new-construction spec home, billed net-30, and finished on schedule. The first invoice cleared at day 47; the second never cleared at all — the homeowner moved to a different bank, the kitchen punch list grew, and six months later the crew wrote off the second invoice and walked off the follow-on garage rewire they had already quoted at a discount to keep the relationship intact.
Three prior contractors on the same homeowner had already logged net-60 and net-90 clearing on contractually net-30 invoices — pattern data with a clear trail, not a one-off dispute. A pre-bid check that reads the trade-experience payment-history block would have pegged the homeowner as a Caution long before mobilization, with the option to renegotiate the payment schedule up front instead of absorbing the loss on closeout.
$41,000 unrecoverable on a kitchen + patio scope change.
The job: a $41,000 kitchen + patio scope change.
A mid-volume GC took a referral on a kitchen-and-patio remodel with a verbal mid-project scope change that turned a $41k bid into a $61k build. Halfway through rough-in, the homeowner started withholding draws on informally-agreed extras — a pattern that one prior contractor had already walked off and two others had absorbed as write-downs. Materials sat on site for nine weeks while the GC tried to recover in writing and through counsel; the final invoice was never paid.
Four dispute filings across the prior twenty months on the same homeowner — one of them a prior contractor who walked off mid-project before their final invoice cleared, which surfaces as the clearest walk-off signal on the dispute-patterns block. The GC who pulled the report would have seen the run-rate and either priced the scope change into a fixed-bid addendum or walked before mobilization.
$19,750 plus lien-foreclosure costs on a re-roof.
The job: a $19,750 re-roof on a residential rental.
A small residential roofer signed a re-roof on a homeowner-owned rental at a competitive price, finished in eight working days, and invoiced net-30. Ninety-one days later the invoice was still open and the homeowner had stopped returning calls. The roofer filed a mechanics lien to coerce payment — only to learn the property had been encumbered with a separately-filed lien from the prior roofer that the homeowner had never disclosed, and that the existing lien put the roofer behind the prior creditor in any foreclosure waterfall.
A mechanic's lien filed on the same parcel in April of the prior year by the prior roofer was still of record when the pre-bid check ran — the liens-and-judgments block surfaces it with the filing date, the claimant name, and the status flag. Knowing it before the bid lets the roofer demand a lien-waiver at contract, escrow the funds at close, or price the lien-foreclosure risk into the bid; signing without seeing it means funding the prior contractor's fight.
Each of these three jobs would have surfaced a Caution on the public-record check before mobilization. Run a free Go / Caution / No-Go verdict on the homeowner or GC plus the property address — no signup, no credit card — and unlock the full line-item report for $35 if you want the details behind the verdict.
Public-record checks. No credit pulls. No homeowner consent form.