Why I built HouseRules

Try to get quotes on a roof today and you will probably end up on a lead-selling site. You type in your project, your phone number, your email. Within the hour your phone starts ringing. It keeps ringing for days. You never asked five companies to call you at dinner. The site you used sold them your number, because that is the business: you are not the customer, you are the product.

Contractors do not love it either. They pay for your contact info whether you hire them or not, alongside a handful of other companies who paid for the same thing. The ones who call fastest and hardest win. The model rewards pressure, not good work.

I did not want to build a better version of that. I wanted the opposite.

On HouseRules, you post the project: what you want done, photos, a budget range, a timeline. Contractors read the whole thing and decide if they want it. The ones who do place a bid: their price, their availability, a short pitch in their own words. You set how many bids you get, 3 to 8, your call, and bidding stops at your limit. No inbox flood, no phone calls, because nobody has your phone number.

Your contact info stays hidden until you pick a bid. Pick one and that contractor, only that contractor, gets your name, phone, and email. Pick nobody and nobody ever gets them. Every contractor on the site is license-verified against the Oregon CCB or Washington L&I registry before they can bid. We never sell leads. It is free for homeowners, and it always will be.

What about contractors? Bidding is free while we grow the Portland marketplace. Later, placing a bid will cost a small fee that scales with project size. A contractor will never pay for a homeowner who ignores them, only for bids they chose to place on projects they actually read. That is the deal, and it is a better one than paying for a phone number four other companies also bought.

We are starting with the Portland metro, where I live, and expanding wherever real projects show up. If you have a project in mind, post it. You make the rules. That is the whole idea, and it is in the name.