How to Find a Tradie on Facebook (and Check Them Properly)

Good trades are booked out months ahead, and the ones with immediate availability are rarely the ones you find by asking around. Local Facebook trade groups are full of tradespeople actively looking for work who can often start within weeks. The catch is that you lose the informal vetting a personal recommendation gives you, so you have to do that checking yourself.

This is a practical guide, not legal advice. Licensing rules and what each register shows differ by state — the links below go to each regulator's own register, and it is worth confirming anything critical with them directly.

Why nobody is calling you back

It is almost never about your job being too small.

Quoting is unpaid work. A trade spends an hour reading plans, pricing materials and writing a number, on a job they may not win. When they are booked to Christmas, the rational thing is to triage — answer the enquiries that look organised and ignore the ones that do not.

So the silence is usually a signal about the enquiry, not the job. A message that gives a site address, a defined scope, a start window and a date you need the price by gets answered far more often than one that asks whether they "do kitchens". That is worth fixing before you conclude nobody is available — we wrote a whole piece on how to scope a quote request for exactly this reason.

But there is a second problem the best-written email cannot solve. Some trades genuinely have no capacity for six months, and no amount of professionalism moves that.

Why Facebook groups actually work

Almost every region in Australia has local trade and building groups — some general, some specific to a town or a trade. The useful thing about them is not that the trades are cheaper or better. It is that the people posting are telling you they have capacity.

That inverts the usual problem. Instead of chasing twelve booked-out businesses and hearing back from two, you are talking to people who want the work and can start.

Three things follow from that, and only one of them is good news:

• Availability is real. Someone advertising for work this week can usually start in weeks rather than months.
• Prices are often keener, because a quiet week costs a sole trader money.
• You have no idea who they are. A recommendation from a neighbour carries years of unspoken vetting. A post in a group carries none.

That last point is the whole article. The availability is worth having. It is only worth having if you do the checking yourself.

Not every trade needs a licence — and that matters

Before the registers, the thing almost every guide gets wrong: a tradesperson with no licence is not automatically a problem. It depends on the trade, the state and the value of the job.

Always licensed, everywhere, at any value. Electrical work, plumbing, draining and gasfitting are specialist work in every state and territory. NSW also treats air conditioning and refrigeration, medical gas and mechanical services the same way. For these there is no threshold and no exception — if they are not licensed, walk away. It is a safety regime, not paperwork.

Sometimes licensed, depending on where you are and how big the job is. Carpentry, painting, wall and floor tiling and structural landscaping are all licensed categories in NSW. Other states license fewer trades, and several apply a value threshold below which no licence is needed at all.

So a landscaper or a painter who does not appear on a register may be entirely legitimate — working in a state, or at a job size, that does not require one. Judge those trades on their work, their referees and their insurance instead.

Worth holding onto: for the specialist trades, no licence ends the conversation. For everyone else, it is not a red flag by itself. The categories differ enough between states that the answer for a Queensland tiler is not the answer for a New South Wales one, so confirm with your own regulator if it matters.

Where to check a licence

Every state and territory keeps a free public register. This takes two minutes and rules out the worst outcome entirely.

	Register
NSW	Verify.Licence NSW
VIC	BPC — Find and check a practitioner
QLD	QBCC licensee register
WA	Building and Energy licence search
SA	CBS — Find a licence holder
TAS	CBOS — Find a licensed tradesperson
ACT	Access Canberra — Choosing a tradesperson
NT	NT Building Practitioners Board

Four things to actually look at, because "they came up in the search" is not the same as "they are licensed for this":

1. Is it current? Some registers only display current holders, so a name that does not appear may be expired rather than fictional.
2. Does the class cover your work? A licence to do one kind of work is not a licence to do all of it.
3. Is it the same name? A licence held by a company the person has no obvious connection to is a real warning sign.
4. Any disciplinary history? Victoria publishes a separate Compliance and Enforcement Register recording disciplinary and prosecution action. Where your state publishes something equivalent, look at it.

Electricians and plumbers are often on a different register

This one trips people up. In several states the builder register will not show an electrician or a plumber at all, because a different body licenses them.

	Electricians	Plumbers
VIC	Energy Safe Victoria — not the BPC	BPC
QLD	Electrical Safety Office	QBCC Plumbing and Drainage register — separate from the builder register
NSW	Verify.Licence NSW	Same register

Elsewhere, start at the regulator in the table above and look for the electrical or plumbing register specifically. If a search returns nothing for an electrician, check you are on the right register before concluding anything.

Those licences are never interchangeable with a builder's. Nobody may do electrical, plumbing or gas work on your house without the specific licence for it — not a generalist, and not you.

Then check the work

A licence proves they are allowed to do the job. It does not prove they are any good at it. Three asks, all reasonable, all of which a working tradesperson can answer in a day:

Photos of three recent jobs like yours. Not a portfolio of their best work ever — recent, and comparable. Ask where and when. Then ask something only the person who did the work would know: what the substrate was, what went wrong, what they would do differently. Staged photos survive a glance and not a question.

A client from the last six months who will take a call. This is the single strongest check, and it is the one most people skip because it feels awkward. It is not. Ask the referee whether the job finished on the quoted price, whether they turned up when they said, and whether anything needed fixing afterwards — and how that was handled.

Public liability insurance, with a certificate of currency. Ask for the document, not the assurance. Check the dates.

If any of the three produces hesitation, you have your answer, and it cost you nothing to find out.

Social media is evidence, if you read it properly

A trade with an active Facebook or Instagram page showing their own work over time is giving you something a referee cannot: a record with dates on it. Look for work photographed in progress, not just finished — framing, waterproofing, rough-in. Anyone can photograph a finished bathroom. Photographing their own membrane before it is tiled is a person who expects it to be inspected.

What matters less than you would think: follower counts, reviews on their own page, and testimonials without a name attached.

Protect yourself on money

Everything above is about who you hire. This is about what happens after.

Never pay a large share before work starts. A materials deposit is normal. Half the job is not. If a trade walks off having been paid in advance, you have no head contractor to chase and no retention to hold — which is a particular problem for an owner builder, because you are the head contractor.

Tie payments to completed, inspected work. Not to dates, and not to promises.

Get it in writing, even informally. What is included, what is not, who supplies materials, and what happens if something is found once work opens up.

The one thing worth remembering

The reason a personal recommendation feels safe is not the recommendation. It is that someone you trust has already watched this person work and seen how they behaved when something went wrong.

You can reconstruct most of that yourself — a current licence, three recent jobs, a referee who answers the phone, and money that follows completed work. It takes an afternoon. It is the difference between using Facebook groups well and using them badly.

SiteForeman keeps your trade contacts, their licence numbers and every quote against the stage they belong to, so the checking you did in week one is still findable in month six.

Related reading

• How to get quotes tradies actually take seriously — scoping a request that gets a real price back
• Owner builder permits in Australia, by state — what you need before you start
• The stages of an Australian house build — which trades you need, and when
• Free owner builder cost calculator — an indicative range for your city and specification