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. Every link below goes to a regulator's own register.

Why nobody is calling you back

It's 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're booked to Christmas, the rational thing is to triage — answer the enquiries that look organised and ignore the ones that don't.

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's 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's a second problem the best-written email can't 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. You post the job; trades who want it reply offering to quote.

That inverts the usual problem. Instead of chasing twelve booked-out businesses and hearing back from two, you describe the work once and the people with capacity come to you. Anyone who replies is telling you they have room in their schedule, which is the one thing you can't find out by ringing around.

Two things follow that are worth having, and one catch:

• Availability is real. Someone answering a job post this week can usually start in weeks rather than months.
• Prices are often keener, because a quiet fortnight costs a sole trader money.
• But anyone can reply. There's no filter on a comment thread. A recommendation from a neighbour carries years of unspoken vetting; a reply to your post carries none, and you may get a dozen of them.

The catch is the whole article. Posting the job is easy and it works. The checking is the part you have to supply yourself, and it's what decides how this goes.

Post it properly, too. The same things that get a booked-out trade to answer an email — the address, the scope, a start window, a date you need the price by — sort the serious replies from the rest before you have to.

Not every trade needs a licence — and that matters

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

Electrical work, plumbing, draining and gasfitting are licensed in every state and territory, at any value. There's no threshold and no exception. If the person doing that work isn't licensed for it, that's the end of the conversation — it's a safety regime, not paperwork.

Every other trade depends on where you're and how big the job is. Which trades need a licence, and above what value, is set state by state and the lists don't match. A landscaper, a painter or a tiler who doesn't appear on a register may be perfectly legitimate.

The registers themselves settle it. Each one lists the licence classes it covers, so a search that returns nothing for a painter in your state either means they're unlicensed or means painting isn't a licensed class there — and the register will tell you which.

So: for electrical, plumbing and gas, no licence ends it. For everything else, absence is a question, not a verdict — and the answer comes from their work, their referees and their insurance.

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" isn't the same as "they're licensed for this":

1. Is it current? Some registers only display current holders, so a name that doesn't appear may be expired rather than fictional.
2. Does the class cover your work? A licence to do one kind of work isn't 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 won't 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're 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're allowed to do the job. It doesn't prove they're any good at it.

Photos of a few recent jobs like yours. Not a portfolio of their best work ever — recent, and comparable to what you need. Ask roughly where and when, the way you would in any normal conversation. Most trades have this on their phone and are happy to send it.

Public liability insurance, with a certificate of currency. Ask for the document rather than the assurance, and check the dates. This is routine and no tradesperson will find it odd.

The best reference is the one they didn't choose

Asking for a referee works, but it's the most awkward thing on this list and the slowest — a past client has to agree to take a call from a stranger, and the tradie has to arrange it. If you can get one, it's genuinely useful. Ask whether the job finished near the quoted price, whether they turned up when they said, and whether anything needed fixing afterwards. It's worth doing on a big job.

For most jobs there's an easier version that tells you more, because the trade didn't curate it.

Search their name in the group you found them in. Local groups have years of history. If someone has worked in the area, other members have usually mentioned them — good or bad — in threads that had nothing to do with you. That's an unfiltered reference and it costs you thirty seconds.

Ask the group. A post saying you're about to use someone and does anyone have experience with them is normal in these groups, and people answer.

Read their public reviews, especially the bad ones. Google and Facebook page reviews can't be edited by the business. The rating matters less than how they replied to the one complaint. A trade who answered a bad review calmly and fixed the problem has told you more than five stars ever could.

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 can't: 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's 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 isn't. If a trade walks off having been paid in advance, you've 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's included, what's 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 isn't the recommendation. It's 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's 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