Can Heating & Air Companies Still Be Trusted?
What's Happened to the HVAC Market?
If you've been quoted a new air conditioner or major repair recently, then you know there has been a major shift in HVAC pricing over the past few years. Changes in consumer habits, advertising, industry culture, and other factors have driven prices up and quality of service down. It's gotten so bad that it has left many consumers questioning can heating and air companies still be trusted.
There was a time where a tradesman would be highly reputable. They'd be a local individual known to you through a friend or family member's personal recommendation. The repairs they'd affect were affordable and made sense. If a pipe burst, a plumber who lived right around the corner from you would come and fix it at a price that kept them in a comfortable living but didn't break your bank. If your HVAC wasn't cooling, a skilled diagnostic technician would troubleshoot the problem and offer repair solutions, not simply insist your ten-year-old air conditioner needed to be replaced. So what happened, what changed?
Three major areas of the heating and air industry have changed: industry culture, consumer habits, and insurance and liability. Understanding these changes can help you navigate them and select a company you can trust and be well taken care of by.
A Sales-Driven Culture
New air conditioner sales mean big money for heating and air companies, and any time there is potential for big money there are those bad actors who are going to try to get a piece of it. Consequently, there are often a lot of actors in the skit you get presented that you don't even realize are there. When you're being sold a new air conditioner, there can be more involved than just the salesman, their company, and the manufacturer providing the equipment. There are sales training companies who teach how to be a hustler and charge as much as $10,000 a day; there are finance companies offering dangerous loans with high dealer fees that get built into your project pricing unbeknownst to you; and there are often industry-common business-killer loans weighing down many heating and air companies into costly cycles of debt.
These bad actors contribute to the rising costs of HVAC systems and repairs, and their influence has been changing the industry's culture for years. More pressure to perform and hit big sales numbers has led many salespersons and companies to practice less-than-honorable sales methods, many of which you should be aware of.
Break it for the Sale
One of the worst practices existing within the HVAC industry is damaging a customer's system worse to create a sales opportunity. This and other similar scams have resulted in local companies losing their licenses, even larger branded ones. Difficult to detect and even more difficult to prove, there are a number of individuals and companies that make this a regular practice and get away with it. Since you don't already know what is wrong with your A/C, and you're not an HVAC tech yourself, it's difficult to know when this happens to you.
Some of the ways HVAC technicians have been known to sabotage a unit include adding the wrong type of refrigerant to it, disconnecting wires, or any number of other ways.
High-Pressure Sales
Unfortunately, the HVAC industry is wrought with scams and dishonest practices. These are widespread because there can be a lot of money in air conditioning work and it is a very competitive market. Technicians are often incentivized with huge commission opportunities, and companies know they need to make all they can during the summer months while the demand is high, so they push hard to get opportunities and close sales. And while there is nothing inherently wrong with trying to make sales and make money, it's only okay so long as it is done honestly and ethically. Unfortunately, though, the revenue potential in HVAC can lead to being overly pushy salespersons and unethical tactics as well as providing poor workmanship by cutting corners to save money or time.
In 2021, one of our area's largest HVAC companies made headlines for losing its HVAC license due to such violations. There were accusations of illicit sales practices and subpar workmanship, and ultimately the State of Alabama revoked their license. This serves as a perfect example that just because a company is large and well-branded it does not mean they are necessarily trustworthy. You want to be sure to do your own homework. Read their website's blogs, read about their team members, read some reviews, and then have a good conversation with them before using their services.
Don't let any sales person push you into buying something you're not comfortable with, and always get a second opinion if you're dealing with a company you've not used before. Beware of salesmen discouraging you from getting additional quotes or telling you that there are limited inventories of what you need.
How Do You Know Who to Trust?
It's becoming more and more difficult to determine what companies are truly trustworthy or not. Online reviews are a great place to start, but are those even real? Research shows that as many as 31% of online reviews are fake, and even some news articles you may find touting a company's reputation may have been paid for and written by the company themselves. These and other problems make determining the real reputation of a company a challenge, but there are definitely some things to look for to start.
Ask the right questions, and be sure you have a good feeling about who you're dealing with. When it doubt, follow our guidelines:
- Check their licensing and insurance
- Review their online reputation, but not just their reviews. Check the Better Business Bureau
- Ask for a written copy of their workmanship guarantee
- Take a look at their social media and get a feel for who they are
- Don't let yourself be pressured into anything
- Always get a second opinion if you don't yet have a trusting relationship with them
Consumer Habits
Let's be honest, while there are several things broken within the HVAC industry, not all of it lies at the feet of the heating and air companies. Back in the day, consumers relied more on referrals and relationships. This meant that companies only had to do an amazing job and their name would be shared when consumers asked their friends and family who they should trust. Now days, however, it's different. Consumers spend less time asking for referrals and more time going to Google.
Climbing Customer Acquisition Costs
According to Google, approximately 68.7% of searchers click one of the top three companies on the list, and the engagement time after clicking through to their website is less than one minute. This means that overwhelmingly consumers click the top spot and then don't much care to spend time researching the company beyond that. As a result, it's become less about being a great company and more about claiming those top spots on Google, and those top spots are not cheap.
On average, it costs a heating and air company as much as $296 to acquire an HVAC customer. This ever-increasing customer acquisition cost keeps being driven higher and higher by the climbing costs of advertising. Angi's List, Yelp, Google, Bing, and other similar lead sources are where consumers are going to find HVAC service providers, and that consumer demand is driving up the cost. As this stands, heating and air companies have to advertise where the consumers are looking for them, and at the end of the day this means passing those advertising costs onto their customers.
Price Shopping to Excess
There's nothing wrong with price shopping to get the best deal. Getting a second or even a third estimate, especially on a large repair or project, is very reasonable. But keep in mind that every time you click a paid ad, every time you have a company send out a technician to speak with you and provide a free estimate, you are costing that company money. When you contact four or five or six or more companies, you've just cost all of them a lot of money that they won't recoup from you. There has to be some reasonable balance between getting a second opinion and excessively shopping around, otherwise you're just contributing to the rising costs of air conditioners that will get passed back to the consumer in the long run.
How Do We Change These Habits?
If you've used an HVAC company before and had a good experience, be loyal to them. Loyal customer bases allow companies to keep their prices lower by advertising less. Establishing solid relationships with home service providers means you'll have a trusted company you won't have to shop around or cost money by finding them through paid ads. If you don't already have a relationship with a repair company, talk to your friends and family. Find someone you do trust and ask about who they've used and their experience with them, then consider giving that company a chance.
Insurance and Liability
In the age of ambulance chasers, companies have to be properly insured. With a fleet of vehicles on the road and dealing with expensive and dangerous electrical and HVAC systems, major accidents can happen. When they do, a consumer should absolutely be protected, but that protection comes at a cost.
How Much is General Liability Insurance?
Heating and air companies pay varying amounts for their general liability insurance. Their rates are based on their performance history, years in business, types of work they do like residential versus commercial, and their total coverage amount. As a rough average, most HVAC companies pay about $1,000 per year per employee. At this amount, a company with twenty employees is paying $20,000 annually just for their general liability insurance. But there are other insurances as well, like worker's comp and vehicle insurance, all of which ads up quickly.
Insurance isn't a new problem, but it has become a more expensive one. According to CBS, car insurance is up 26% in 2024, and CBiz points to lawsuits as to why general liability costs are on the rise. This goes a little bit back to consumer habits and how litigious we are as a society, but a lot of lawsuits aren't just sue-happy consumers. Workmanship has been on the decline in a number of industries, HVAC included, which is a factor in why insurance claims and costs are on the rise.
Mitigating Liability
Beyond insurance, many heating and air companies have changed their service practices to help mitigate liability. A prime example of this is refusing to quote repairs in many situations, like on any air conditioning system over a certain age. The reason for this is that when it comes to troubleshooting and repairs, sometimes fixing things isn't guaranteed. You can fix the one problem only to find there is another that could not have been discovered prior to fixing the first thing, or you may fix the one small thing and have some other part break in a matter of hours or days that simply isn't your fault. In these cases, it's often hard to get a customer to understand why additional repairs are needed. Customers can become frustrated and refuse to pay in these situations.
It's much easier to satisfy a customer by giving them something brand new. Selling a new HVAC system makes the HVAC company more money and eliminates the risk of an upset customer over repair complications.
Can it Be Fixed?
It's pretty tough to turn around an entire society's culture of being quick to sue and intolerant of repair complications, but it's certainly possible to fix this. Using reputable companies that put a strong emphasis on training and excellence is a good start to preventing the need to make so many insurance claims. More so, a reputable company will step up and just fix things when it's their fault so that you don't have to get a lawyer and make the whole thing more expensive. Try sticking to the companies that have a strong reputation represented by online reviews and referrals from people you know.
New Systems, New Systems, New Systems
The combined factors of culture, consumer habits, and other insurance costs and liabilities have pushed so many HVAC companies into being just a new air conditioning system dispensary. They can't survive if they aren't selling high-cost new systems.
There is certainly a time to replace your HVAC unit, but when they time comes it needs to make sense to you. The technician recommending it should be explaining the reasoning behind it instead of just trying to get you to sign a financing agreement. And they should never have a problem with you getting a second opinion.
Learn About Us and Why We Are Your Trusted HVAC Solution
We take the time to explain the problems in our industry so that you can understand why we're your solution to them. Our company adheres to best practices to keep our acquisition cost down, liabilities mitigated, and our culture professional and ethical. Transparency, training, and workmanship guarantees are of the utmost importance to us. With every estimate or repair, we begin with a free assessment. We'll come out and introduce ourselves at not cost. This gives you a chance to get to know us without committing your hard-earned dollars to anything. From there, we'll provide written estimates that include our warranties and workmanship guarantees as well as a detailed scope of work. Setting the right expectations in writing protects our customers as well as ourselves and avoids disputes and confusion.
Our company also thoroughly vets and checks the background and experience of everyone we hire. We have zero tolerance for drugs and even less tolerance for treating customers poorly.
Get to know us in person, but also check us out online. Our reviews are fantastic and we are members of the Better Business Bureau and local Chambers of Commerce. You can meet our team members here on our website as well as learn more about us through our Facebook, or read about our story and our mission.
Free Assessments & Estimates
It's important to us to earn your trust. To start with this, we have no call-out fee. You shouldn't have to pay to meet us and see if we're the right fit for you. That's why we'll come out at no cost and take a look at whatever your problem is. From there, we'll provide free estimates for repairs, replacements, or advanced troubleshooting.