Why Is There No Uber for Plumbing/hvac? (and Why There Ought to Be)

Learn how to fix your own stuff. Problem solved.

Yes, it would be nice if everything was easy, fair, and equitable. But:

Almost anyone can become an Uber driver without much effort. Not true for plumbers and HVAC people.

There are so many drivers available they're waiting for your call. Any decent plumbing/HVAC company has a backlog.

All Uber drivers are centralized under one pricing system. Plumbers/HVACs control their own pricing logic. I've never gotten contractor estimates that weren't across a huge range from low to high.

You can never trust a referral unless it's from someone you know that received the service themselves.

Uber vs. plumbing/HVAC is apples and oranges.

People on a forum run by VC types or wannabes complaining about the capitalistic system. They have the money, get to it. Figure out how to make plumbing robots or ai systems that turn software geeks into wrench jockeys.

Why does $Company charge so much? Cuz they can.

Plumbing, HVAC and other skilled trades operate almost entirely B2B, not B2C. The very premise of this article is why that is the case...people who don't understand what is required, what is good, and how construction operates shopping solely on price with unreasonable expectations.

That $22k quote? That's how a company can pay for capacity during peak demand...i.e. paying skilled workers enough to make extra long hours with no expectation of repeat business worth the effort, paying suppliers enough to get priority access to inventory, and of course making it worth dealing with customer-is-always-right amateurs.

Uber operates by letting customers not give a shit about their drivers (and not giving a shit about them itself). In the world where people have reasonable options, relationships matter and relationships are non-fungible.

It’s called home warranty companies.

I can't comment on this idea but I will say that I would have expected press fittings to have brought down the cost of plumbing because they don't require soldering up to certain diameter. But they don't seem to have had any impact on the cost of plumbing despite not requiring as much skill.

https://www.ferguson.com/content/ideas-and-learning-center/t...

Oddly, the article does not talk about "why"!

So - let me shoot my guess. Uber didn't invent a new category. There were already taxi dispatchers, and there were already "radio-taxi" and "mini-cab" dispatchers - private driver fleets, who weren't licensed to be flagged down curbside, but otherwise operated as Uber. You placed a call, the operator gave you a quote and wait estimate, and told you the license plate of the car to expect.

Uber just put a fancy app on this.

Uber and Lyft basically destroyed the taxi industry by subsidizing incredibly cheap rides until they had wiped out independent drivers, then gradually raised their prices much higher than taxis ever were.

If there was an Uber for plumbing/HVAC, you would get ONE quote, and it would be higher than any of the ones you got.

So I'm not sure that's the future we should be racing toward.

> An Uber-like, magical experience that you can trust to show up on time, do the right thing on your behalf, and fractionalize prices in an antiquated industry.

I can summon an Uber and, by magic, I have a rather high chance of getting a distracted driver in a run-down car with a bunch of nasty air fresheners

If Uber does this to me, I will still probably be unharmed at the end of the ride and I’m done which it. If an HVAC contractor does that, I have years of suckage ahead of me.

It's typical for those trades to have extensive licensing requirements. In my state (OR) plumber and HVAC licenses require four years of apprenticeship. Additionally the HVAC trade has gatekeeping around the EPA refrigerant licensing and supply distributors/manufacturers who will only sell to contractors.

In some countries there is.

India has this thing called as urban company

Does HVAC, Plumbing and much more https://www.urbancompany.com

You mean Jackie's List? A thing that already existed? Or this thing called The Phone Book?

Thumbtack has access to all sorts of handy people. Hired multiple people from the app for all sorts of needed home projects

Exploitation already runs rampant in the trades, so does incompetence (see CyFy Home Inspections on Youtube).

The last thing the trades need is the profiteering, abuse and unsustainable race-to-the-bottom that Uber brings with it.

Surprised no one has mentioned that Private Equity has rolled-up most HVAC operations. Not sure about Dallas, but what he describes certainly suggests that the Dallas market is controlled by PE. E.g.

https://prospect.org/2023/10/16/2023-10-16-private-equity-in...

There definitely is something like that in several EU countries: it's called Yoojo and there are people using it.

They've got local sites, per country:

https://yoojo.fr

https://yoojo.be

https://yoojo.lu

And there are electricians and plumbers who can fix (and install) HVAC.

It’s a much simpler answer. There is a shortage of skilled blue collar workers. When demand outstrips supply for talent, talent becomes more expensive and low-quality talent survives longer. It’s the exact same in construction which is why construction costs are so high (and quality of work worse).

For example, there’s a forecasted 550K plumber gap in the US— https://www.morningbrew.com/stories/2024/03/15/plumber-short...

It’s “easy” (from a barriers to entry perspective) to become an uber driver. It’s also hard to advertise to one-off riders. Uber exists to match a super liquid pool of drivers with a large rider base.

There is no incentive for a plumber to sign up for a platform like this that (1) takes a cut and (2) will say if you are bad. You as a plumber have plenty of work.

Solving this is not a tech problem, it’s a labor supply problem.

(I run a company that at one point took a ton of tier 1 venture money to use tech/automation to solve a blue collar skilled talent problem. It was extremely unsuccessful.)

task rabbit is sort of uber for a lot of non driving things, many house repair/handyman people available. not sure if they go all the way to major things like hvac

the real issue is that since you don't need the contractor immediately you can cut the middle man! then consider the median price the gigs and it makes sense.

A lot of these "Uber for X" conversations miss a deeper point. The software only works as a force multiplier when the underlying labor is modular and fungible. Ridesharing works because every trip is basically the same API call i.e. person A to location B.

Plumbing or HVAC isn’t like that. Every house is a legacy system with zero documentation and different failure modes. Half the job is reverse engineering decades of homeowner hacks, and mystery piping. The other half is risk management.

If Uber had to deal with "each car is different, some are from 1978, half the wiring was DIY, and if you route one trip wrong the customer’s house floods," it would look very different.

The heterogeneity of the physical world is the limiting factor. Basically, devops for building (instrumentation, diagnostics and standardization).

Disintermediation. The degree which marketplace platforms can exert pressure against disintermediation determines their right to exist.

Certain markets, it's absolutely trivial for marketplace participants to agree to an off-market transaction, cutting the marketplace out of any transaction fees. That's what killed all the Uber for Maids businesses of the early 10s.

Uber for Uber, on the other hand, is an absolutely amazing platform for preventing disintermediation. Occasionally, you'll get a driver handing you their personal business card and saying call me directly if you want a ride to the airport but overwhelmingly, people are unable to get around the platform, regardless of how high the middleman cut is.

(Decent) Plumbing requires significantly more skill than driving a car or bike. As a result, the variance in service quality will be far wider.

This voids the "generic" fulfilment model.

About 10 years ago my AC failed. Decided it was time to replace both my units including the air handler. Bought the equipment online from Alpine Air and it arrived in a few days. Then I put an ad on Craigslist for a AC installation. Paid $1000 for each unit to be installed. Watched a bunch of YouTube videos to learn what “good” looked like, and just watched over the guys shoulder the whole time, asking him questions about how he was measuring the vacuum etc. Saved around $10k compared to the quotes I’d received from Home Depot and Lowe’s. Would do it again.

We called this a "handyman" back in the day. They're still around.