MODERN LIVING: Don’t Do It Yourself

For many a helpless housewife and hapless weekend handyman, life’s most nagging little crisis is an encounter with a leaky roof, a broken window or a clogged drain. Professional repairmen are hard to find, harder to pay. The do-it-yourself books often produce only frayed tempers, flayed thumbs. Last week, from Los Angeles to Long Island, the unhandy were entrusting chores to a new and spreading U.S. service: the home-repair club.

The new clubs supply homeowners with good repairmen around the clock, guarantee their work. When Hurricane Donna swept across Long Island’s Nassau County last week, more than a thousand homeowners with flooded basements, leaking roofs and fallen trees put in urgent calls to Allied Homeowners’ Association of Roslyn, one of the biggest and most bustling of the U.S. home-repair clubs. The crews of some 30 Allied contractors, from plumbers and tree surgeons to swimming-pool pumpers, went right to work. In recent weeks, Allied also supplied a cotton candymaker for a children’s party, searched for a woman’s contact lenses in vacuum cleaner dust, drew up estimates for the cost of building a pool and shelter-house for a duck that a twelve-year-old camper brought back from camp.

Across the U.S., home-repair clubs retrieved a Pasadena woman’s emerald ring that had been inadvertently flushed down the drain, exterminated night-chirping crickets that kept a Long Island insurance agent awake, sent a geologist to a Pacific homesite to estimate the danger of rockslides for a nervous homebuyer.

No Padding the Bill. Most of the several hundred home-repair clubs are patterned after the first don’t-do-it-yourself club, United Home Services, Inc., which started in Los Angeles in 1954. United signed up a stable of contractors to do the jobs funneled to them through the club, now has 400 to handle an average 200 calls for service a week. The home-repair clubs handle all the paperwork, send bills to customers, skim 10% of the plumber’s or painter’s fee in exchange for giving him the job. The customer who joins the club (for about $5 to $15 a year) thus can pay for all his repairs in one monthly bill. The home-repair club is no quick road to riches (clubs in Detroit, Chicago and elsewhere have gone broke), but many clubs prosper on their customers’ problems. Long Island’s Allied expects to contract about $1,000,000 worth of business this year through its 5,000 members, take in an additional $46,000 from franchise rights to 70 other clubs.

Though professional repairmen are a notably independent lot, they flocked to sign up with the home-repair clubs, seldom try to pad their bills to make up for the 10% club fee. Reason: they save more than 10% by using the club since it assumes the costs of advertising and billing, keeps nonpayment of bills down to 1% v. sometimes as high as 10% for nonclub clientele. Moreover, the ready-made market shoots up business. TV Repairman Kenneth Daniel’s business has doubled in the year that he has been affiliated with San Francisco’s Homesmith Inc.

Bartenders & Cowboys. The householder also benefits. The best home-repair clubs take pains to find honest and efficient contractors, follow through to make sure the work is done properly at reasonable prices. It usually is; the contractor knows he stands to lose not one but hundreds of customers.

The successful clubs vary widely in the services they perform, the customers they serve. Washington’s Services Unlimited will supply bartenders for diplomats but not baby sitters or liquor. Long Island’s Allied lists some 250 regular chores—plus 150 special services, such as entertaining at parties. One of the cheeriest jobs was performed by a tree surgeon for Chicago’s National Home Owners Club. Called to “fix a tree,” he was confronted with a 14-ft. Christmas tree that needed decorating. He did a glad job—for $25.