Sep 1, 2026 · 10 min · 7 segments
If your service is great and your review count is thin, stale, or both, this one's for you. You're losing jobs to competitors who aren't better than you. They just look better in the places homeowners…
Here's how a homeowner picks a home services company they've never used before.
They search, they get a list, and in the first 10 seconds, they're looking at two things, how many reviews and how recent.
Not the content of the review, not the company description, not the website, Star count and recency.
Those two signals tell them more than anything else in that first pass about whether this is a real company people trust.
A company with 400 reviews averaging 4.8 stars with three new ones this week beats a company with 40 reviews averaging five stars with the last one six months ago.
even if the second company is genuinely better because that homeowner doesn't know that.
I think about reviews a lot when we're starting a new location because the goal is we want to generate as many reviews as we humanly possibly can because we know how important this is.
How fast can we get to a couple of hundred and then keep that momentum rolling? Recency matters almost as much as count because it tells the homeowner that the company is active, that the service is consistent, and that other people just like them have made this decision recently.
Your review profile is your first impression before you ever pick up the phone.
Here's how a homeowner picks a home services company they've never used before.
They search, they get a list, and in the first 10 seconds, they're looking at two things, how many reviews and how recent.
Not the content of the review, not the company description, not the website, Star count and recency.
Those two signals tell them more than anything else in that first pass about whether this is a real company people trust.
A company with 400 reviews averaging 4.8 stars with three new ones this week beats a company with 40 reviews averaging five stars with the last one six months ago.
even if the second company is genuinely better because that homeowner doesn't know that.
I think about reviews a lot when we're starting a new location because the goal is we want to generate as many reviews as we humanly possibly can because we know how important this is.
How fast can we get to a couple of hundred and then keep that momentum rolling? Recency matters almost as much as count because it tells the homeowner that the company is active, that the service is consistent, and that other people just like them have made this decision recently.
Your review profile is your first impression before you ever pick up the phone.
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