Checkatrade vs MyBuilder: which is better for landlords?

Checkatrade lists vetted tradespeople who pay a membership to appear. You search by trade and postcode, read reviews, and contact the firms you like directly. Its great advantage is the depth of public reviews and the sheer number of members, which makes it strong when you want to judge a specific firm before calling.

The cost is your time: you do the searching, the contacting, and the chasing, and you decide who to trust from their profile and feedback. For compliance work the final check is always yours whichever platform you use: gas engineers must be on the Gas Safe Register, and fixed electrical work falls under Part P of the Building Regulations.

MyBuilder flips the direction. You post the job once, and interested trades get in touch — you then look at their profiles and past job feedback and invite the best to quote. Trades pay to be matched to or contact you about jobs.

It's efficient for one-off jobs because you describe the work once instead of contacting firms one by one. The trade-off is that you're managing inbound responses and still comparing quotes written in different formats.

If you self-manage a property or two and enjoy choosing your own trades, Checkatrade's reviews give you confidence in a specific firm. If you'd rather not hunt and prefer trades to come to you, MyBuilder's post-a-job model saves the searching.

Across a portfolio, both share the same limitation: you still arrange access around tenants, chase responses, and reconcile quotes that don't line up. For compliance jobs — EICRs, gas safety certificates, post-Awaab damp work — you also need to make sure each firm holds the right qualification, which neither platform does for you.