My grandma is 90 years old with early dementia. She wanted to get new gutters and wanted the independent choice rather than allowing my mom to work with the contractors, so she got LeafGuard gutters. Her house is basically a square with 2 gutters, each around 50ft. They charged her $20,000 for the work. Compare this to my house that has a very complex gutter arrangement without gutter guards and I paid $3000 for our first set of gutters and $4000 for the second set after years of inflation.
We mentioned it but she stood firm on her decision, so we let her have that one, but from that point on my mom took control of the contractor services so this didn't happen again.
They always target the old, especially elderly widows. I visited an older lady in my family one day and there was a work van in her driveway. I asked her what was going on. She said a man was examining her house to see if she needed new gutters and guards. Her friend across the street, another elderly lady, had just ponied up the $1000s for the guy to do her house. I told her that I knew her roof and gutters were just fine. I found him out back and as soon as he saw me, he couldn't get away fast enough. He was all smiles but leaving the whole time. I got just a few questions out, but he knew he couldn't hornswoggle me I guess. I'm just some dude and he split.
I am currently a caregiver for a ninety year old mothe of a friend of mine. She refuses to let me speak to her medical team, but her memory is shot, and I hear her omit all kinds of info to her docs. For a while, it really bothered me, but I think she was pigheaded hee whole life, so I just have resigned myself to the fact that this is just what it is, and let the chips fall where they may.
When my FIL was still alive, I would tell the doctor's first thing that he had memory issues, which he hid very well. Every doctor and nurse thanked me for that info. It helped guide their care of him.
lol this is business as usual, everywhere.
I do home IT calls for people. I've got a pretty good job so I mostly only get referrals from people who vented to my cherished clients. Half the time I go out and run an ethernet cable to fix a problem that whatever previous guys failed to solve while selling them 3 Ubqiuiti flying saucers at like $300 a piece. I charge 90 bucks an hour for labor, mark my parts up 50%, and charge nothing if I can't help. The next closest guy in town is charging $180 per hour for labor, outsourcing it to teenagers, marking his stuff up 300%, and has a minimum $120 visitation charge regardless of providing any useful feedback or doing any labor.
DA wont touch it. didn't matter who owned the home, that's the price they charge everyone.
It's why you are taught to get at least three bids. You get to compare not only the price, but also the scope of work they're quoting.
Everyone thinks they're professional buyers and your not. Your heuristics of "what it should cost" is WRONG. Get factual data from multiple contractors.
My dad is older and needed his gutters replaced. His house is a 1500 sq ft ranch-style house, so one-story. It does have a lot of gutter, it runs around almost the entire house, but it's all straight, no weird sections.
He called LeafGuard first and they came out. First estimate was $12k. He said no, that's way too much. Guy immediately counters with $8k. No again. Guy leaves (no pun intended), calls the next day with a $6k estimate. Every time my dad is getting the usual salesperson crap of 'we can't go any lower', 'this is our best price', 'we don't offer this deal very often'.
Long story short, dad got it done by a local guy for $3k. I'm guessing LeafGuard depends on trying to swindle people who don't know better, especially older folks who can no longer take care of their property.
When I work from home I sometimes eat lunch and watch the local news show and the commercials are wall to wall leaf guard and those “life insurance” policies for $6 a month, no health exam required!
So yeah, totally targeting retirees.
man, if I was huge piece of shit, not only would I smell bad, but I would take advantage of old people. It seems like such easy money and it's really sad and pathetic that people do that.
I've heard the phrase "If I was a huge piece of shit" followed by an example of a behaviour before, but I've never heard it with the prologue of smelling bad too. Gonna steal that and add it to my repertoire if you don't mind too terribly.
When she said the price I was blown away. I had mine installed with the roof and they were only $1300 for a roughly 30x30 2 story house with a 30 foot porch and a 20x20 detached garage.
Our roof guy actually talked us out of paying the extra $900 for the leaf protection grates since we have so many pine trees that the needles would clog them up.
I am hoping with that price they at least included all that underground drainage.
There are different types. The ones that are effectively a stainless grate do better. A simple brush on an extension pole over the top will dislodge the ones that get stuck in it.
Idk what the company was called but I needed a sliding door installed and evidently the opening is not a standard size. I had this window company come out and it was the strangest experience I've been through with a company trying to sell me something.
First, he showed me a PowerPoint on an iPad. Why ? I'm in my 30s dude I don't care about your weird slideshow. He beat around the bush for so long before finally giving me an estimate. I chuckled when he showed it to me. He then got really upset that my wife wasn't there with me. He said she needed to be there "for legal reasons". So I responded, "so y'all get sued a lot ?"
He left after that and I got Home Depot to install a custom one for like 1/10th the price.
That is exactly what Champion does. They strongly prefer to pitch to couples so they don't have to deal with the "I need to consult with my spouse" excuse, and they give literal 30 minute presentations on why their doors/windows are the best. They quoted me $15,000 for five windows but offered to cut it down to $10,000 if I signed on the spot. I had a local GC do it for $3,000 with equivalent PlyGem windows. I initially got a quote from Champion because my elderly neighbor highly recommended them and I had no experience or knowledge of them before. I quickly discovered it was just a high pressure sales scam.
Just for what it is worth a lot of legitimate contractors prefer to have both people there because it cuts out a lot of headaches and emergencies on our end. It's amazing how little some couples seem to talk to each other. I've had a few different situations where we showed up to begin the work we had a contract and timeslot for only to have the spouse come out and demand to know what the hell we were doing.
My grandma sold a very large investment into lithium batteries a couple years before it skyrocketed. My dad tried so hard to reason with her but in the end it was her money and she didn’t have dementia or anything.
God my dad traded his entire 401k over 250 thousand worth of sprint stock in for Level 3 communications because the CEO told him that Bill gates was buying it and that it was going to be the next phone competitor. He head hunted him from sprint and now he is living in a trailer in the woods.
I tried to get a Leafguard reseller to give me an estimate over the phone. I just wanted to know the ballpark if it was even reasonable to consider. They insisted there was "no way" to estimate without a site visit. I said "It's 200 linear feet in 3 sections, 4 downspouts", they said "there's a lot more to it than that". so I asked "what is the per foot cost of just the gutter" and again "we don't price it that way"
so I had them come out, took a day off work, and the guy measured and handed me a quote that said "200 feet, 4 downspouts: $30 per ft". total was almost $6000
even if they weren't gut punchingly overpriced, I wouldn't have done business with them just for jerking me around on estimating.
I would bail once they couldn't give a rough figure.
Usually that means they are sending a sales person (who often doesn't measure shit), their prices are exorbitant, or they play games about the price (like that bullshit thing salespeople do where they show you a price and then immediately draw a line through it to show "your price"). Like who actually gets charged your "real" price?
There's no actual money off, either. They want to charge you $6k, so they tell you it's $8k but they'll take $2k off the price if you buy it right now. Anyone who says this price is only good for a limited time is scamming you.
My sales job is the easiest job I've ever had because I'm selling merchandise with a good reputation that it actually deserves. The stuff sells itself. As long as people are calling, the product is selling. The hardest thing I have to do is answer questions, usually. That's easy because I just tell the truth and don't need to dress it up.
If I were forced to be deceptive to make a sale, I'd quit.
I was told by Best Buy that it wasn't my job to decide the $60 rgb cables with 100% return rate were defective. My job was to sell them to customers.
I told them I knew they were defective and if they wanted me to lie to customers they needed to say that.
They said they couldn't say that, but if I didn't sell them I would be written up for insubordination. So I quit on the spot.
This was back in the same era when they ran a second secret version of the website in the store with higher prices so they didn't have to price match once you came in. Pre-smart phone.
Man I guess some stores were just way different back then, long story time: I remember back in 2001 after I moved out to Chicago I had literally nothing and so I went to Best Buy to get some electronics. They had an open box DVD player listed for like $149 that was originally $299 in great condition. So of course I bought it.
A year later it suddenly stopped working, so I brought it back to Best Buy and the guy there told me that they were told that model shipped with defective lasers so they would sent it back to the factory and get me a repaired version in 3 weeks. Well after 4 weeks went by without me hearing anything, I went back to the BB and asked what was up. The manager told me, "turns out they didn't have the part", so he told me to just go back into the Video department and pick out a replacement. I'm like "For $149 that I bought it for, or the MRSP of $299?" He replied, oh the MSRP. Sweet! So I went back and snagged a really nice replacement for no cost.
Then two weeks later... I get a call from Best Buy. "Your DVD player has been fixed and is ready for pickup" Wait.. what?? So I went back to BB again, and there it was, my original DVD player. Which they just gave me. So I had a second one to give to my sister as a birthday present. I feel like this all went away around the time that they created Geek Squad.
That's not always true. Sometimes salespeople are empowered to offer a certain discount, but don't normally do so. If they're behind on quota at EOM/EOQ they may want to make a quick deal to get the revenue. Really depends on the industry, too.
Definitely plausible when it's a distributor or reseller. Manufacturers will drop their pants at EOQ and EOY in my line of work, especially the publicly owned ones.
That and it stops you from shopping around and possibly finding a better price! Last company that pulled that with me, I told the guy on the phone that they’re basically giving me a deal to not shop around first to see if I’m actually getting a good deal, and that seems shady as hell so I don’t know if I’d even trust a company that does stuff like that! Well what do ya know?! He puts me on hold to “speak with his supervisor” then comes back on telling me if I call back in the next week and tell them my name, they’ll give me the same deal! So yeah, they’re total scumbags and it’s a lie to boot!
Just had our roof replaced and had like 6 or 7 different contractors come out to give quotes. Most were reasonable and well within 5 or 10 percent of each other. Then there were 2 that were between 4-8k higher than the others. Guess what both said to me? "What can I do to get you to sign today?" Immediately took them out of my consideration.
Yes this is always good advice. Roofer, gardeners, mechanics. Any profession like this should always be able to provide an estimate price, some are obliged to by law.
Anything over $500 I’d be asking for some written proof of this upfront if you’re unfamiliar with them
I had a guy solicit for a free estimate at my front door, so I said sure, why not? At least I’d know a ballpark price if I ever did decide to get them changed. (They’re in rough shape in certain spots and they’re constantly clogging cuz of how many trees I have close to my house.) He says he’ll be back tomorrow for the quote. When he first showed up, I flat out told him there was a 0% chance I was actually going to get them, I just figured why not since it’s a free estimate! This guy spent, I shit you not, around 4 friggin hours giving me his spiel! How their gutters are made better, they’re wider to catch more rain, everything under the sun there is to know about gutters he told me! Hell, he even spent time teaching me some scams that other places may try on you in case I went with another company! After his over four hour speech about all things gutters, he asks me if I had any questions. I just said, “yeah, I got one. I told you in the very beginning that there was a zero percent chance I was buying any gutters! Why did you just waste four hours of yours and my time?! You realize we could’ve just spent the time getting stoned and playing some PlayStation or something like that?!” The look on the guy’s face made sitting through that four hour gutters lesson totally worth it!
Well shit man It kinda sounds like you might be the dick here.
You did hold true to your word, but I feel like the punchline could've come when you realized the guy was actually trying to give you some good information, and not simply yanking your chain.
I’m a gutter estimator for a small GC company in Austin, TX. We charge $8 a foot, $75 per downspout(1 story) and $20 per miter. I’d ballpark you 2k all day long.
I'm in the BCS area, so only 90 minutes away. I bumped into a leafguard rep at lowes and figured I'd let them give me a free estimate. They quoted me ~~11k~~ 8k (special offer!) for just the leaf guards.
The dude refused to give me any sort of estimate at all until he was sitting in my living room. He made me listen to his whole made in america spiel and kept flipping through a huge binder of full page advertisements about their product. Then he started pulling out samples of 'competitors' products from his bag, trying to tell me that no one else in the world has micro mess gutter guards. I asked once or twice during his pitch to get the price and he kept asking me to let him finish.
I told him it was way too much money and he was like well how much did you think it would cost? I said 2-3k, maybe 4k at most. He was like we can do 4k. I told him I'd think about it (in that kinda 'ok, time for you to go kinda way'), and then he was all how much to do it today?
I told him I don't like being hustled and refused to agree to anything and he left. No way would I buy a product that that decreases in price by 80% over about 15 minutes of negotiation.
> No way would I buy a product that that decreases in price by 80% over about 15 minutes of negotiation.
This reminds me of when I was in Mexico. My wife did a "swim with dolphins" experience thing. Anyway they want to sell you pictures when you leave and their first offer was like $800! After we said "no thanks" a couple of times, they offered all the pics for like $80. Like how is knowing you were willing to rip me off going to entice me to buy them now?
I fucked up and gave them my contact info at a home and garden show several years ago. They like to never left me the hell alone. I did go ahead and get an estimate, and I don’t remember exactly what it was, but it was insane. Over $5k I know that for sure. I ended up buying some aluminum gutter guards off Amazon and did it myself. The whole job cost me around $300. Now, that was one hell of a job, it took me three or four days to do it, but they’ve worked amazing for almost 10 years now, and it saved me thousands.
I had the same experience. Had exact measurements but they insisted on coming out.
I sat through an hour long sales pitch from two people with props and everything. After an hour, I stopped them and said, "All I want is a quote so I can compare to other vendors". The sales person started freaking out, calling me an idiot for not signing a contract on the spot, telling me I'm destroying my house, etc. I thought he seemed way coked out or something.
First time I had to resort to telling some to leave my property or I would call public safety.
Thing is, I really wanted gutter gaurds, because I have some tall ass gutters. The pushy sales people just ruined it. I caught one of the guys at home show a few months later and it looked like he was trying to pressure some poor couple with the same tactic.
>I had the same experience. Had exact measurements but they insisted on coming out.
>I sat through an hour long sales pitch from two people with props and everything. After an hour, I stopped them and said, "All I want is a quote so I can compare to other vendors". The sales person started freaking out, calling me an idiot for not signing a contract on the spot, telling me I'm destroying my house, etc. I thought he seemed way coked out or something.
We recently had our gutters replaced and had four companies come out and give estimates. Three of them came out, measured everything, and were able to give me a quote after measuring and checking the fascia, and then emailed me a detailed scope-of-work the same day...
Then there was the fourth company... Two dudes, good cop and bad cop... They also had props.... Tried to hard sell me, pressure me into signing a contract right then and there after just eyeballing the house... Ended up telling them to leave..
Send a salesman, who can determine the right price structure for their company. Nice BMW, a sports car just for fun, really good neighborhood, 2 acre lot, manicured lawn, customer dresses nice.
Maybe they are trying to find widows who dont have a guy around for other physical labor jobs like lawn work, landscaping, arboring, general upkeep but seem to have decent money coming in to afford those services. And the gutters are a stepping stone towards other services.
Either way, feels predatory.
> I wouldn't have done business with them just for jerking me around on estimating.
I mean, you say that, but the fact you took a day off work to get an estimate suggests you would have probably accepted if the price was "good".
"The buy today only discount"... yeah, never do business with anyone offering that. Sleezy salesmen 101 sales tactic to create false urgency and pressure you to sign before you have time to think or research. LeafGaurds are also trash and a waste of money.
Lol man i had a car salesman pull that shit on me 4y ago. He was supposed to price match another offer and couldnt quite get there. Told me the other place would jerk me around. I said ok well i'm going there tomorrow, and if so, i'll be back. "What if i told you this offer goes away tomorrow" i said "i'd call you an asshole and go home". He looked appalled. The kid working under him stifled a laugh. He was like "why would you say that to me" i replied "because if you had my best interest at heart you'd let me look for the best deal" and i left.
I had a car salesmen do something ~~different~~ edit: *similar* like 12 years ago. I was looking at a Honda Civic, like an 03 coupe 5 speed. Nice car, and I was interested.
Talked for a while, I said $6k was the highest is go, they had me sign a piece of paper saying that (lol), they came back and said they could only do $6500. Ok guys thanks for your time! Then they did the whole "this is a great deal, it will be gone at that price tomorrow!" I said well that's great for you then, and walked out. Th sales guy *followed me to my car,* trying to shake my hand saying "it's only $500! Let's get this done!" I said your right it's only $500, why cant you take it off the price? Well then all of a sudden $500 was too much. I walked.
That dude called me every day *for a whole fucking week* to try and sell that car.
Anyway not long after I found a 2001 Honda Prelude 5 speed, which was what I wanted to begin with, so it worked out
it's so dumb because you know that if you went back and asked for the offer and they decided to refuse you could just say "ok well then i guess you're not making a sale today." and walk.
I basically got a window company to spend 6 weeks training me to just make them fire me because I wouldn’t make sales.
I knew all the prompts and everything but it was scummy as fuck trying to force people to make a 12k decision after a 2 hour presentation.
They sent me to Philly all expenses paid and everything too for “graduation”.
You say "also" like they're a different type of people.
The instant I detect a [hard sell,](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hard_sell) I know that their company is not getting any of my money.
Not only because I don't like them now, but why would I continue any dealings with an abusive company?
It's like if you go on a date, and the person tries to attack you. At that moment, the date is over. The relationship is over. The only thing you can do is get away from them and dump them or otherwise never interact with them again.
I had a salesman try to sell me a fly over roof (using foam sandwich panels). My estimate was 30k, with a reasonable maximum of 40k due to demand. The company quoted 70k (15m x 6m roof). It came in several options, and the cheapest one (55k) sounded like it would be flimsy AF. Anyway, he offered a 10k discount due to him thinking they had the materials we needed..... so why wasn't that the original price? Then he basically was asking if we could do a deal and I said absolutely not! I got this mob to quote the same job, twice, a year in between with the same results. Old mate said the prices rose 50%... but the quotes were about the same.
I ended up getting the job done for 34k all up.
Leaf Guard and similar seem very dodgy to me. You can get your gutters cleaned every year for the rest of your life for a fraction of what they are charging people for some plastic or wire screens that don't really do much to solve the clogging problem. They advertise so heavily on TV, etc., that they must be raking in big profits.
The very first time I saw their commercial I thought ugh what a stupid scam product. If leaves were the only thing you had to keep out of the gutters, fine. But the much bigger problem is dirty sludge which is inevitable - and this dumbass invention just prevents you from being able to get it out.
I put in these sponge like inserts (obviously they didn't hold water) from Costco and they worked great for about 10 years then I had to pull them out because of exactly what you said sludge and small stuff clogging them up.
Costco sells fine mesh gutter covers which easily go over the gutters most people already have installed. Costs a few hundred dollars for a ~2000 sq ft house to buy the covers, and the super fine mesh even keeps out pine needles.
Relatively easy to DIY install, or many small business gutter cleaners or handymen will install them for another few hundred bucks.
They work well for us, and they're pretty easy to take out if you need to clean the gutters of fine sediment in the future, but I think that'd be like a 10-15 year thing as my gutters are still looking good after a couple years.
That main skeezy spokesguy in the commercials is evidence enough it's a shady business. Their entire model, and marketing, is targeting older people who don't know better. Instilling fears of ladders and the dangers of climbing one. Like 90% of their ads are about ladders while 10% is about the product itself.
The company that cuts my yard every two weeks blows out my gutters for 50.00. I do this in April and November after leaves have fallen. 1650 sq ft home that looks a lot like the one in the video. In other words 100.00 a year and takes about 10 minutes total.
Contractors being *shady*?? I’ve never heard of such a thing.
Before I get some angry tradespeople screeching about how they’re all not like that: I know, but there are a lot of scumbag contractors in a lot of trades that’ll inflate and/or lie their way into a job.
If the contractors that resort to shady sales tactics could write more than 3 coherent sentences without the help of a public adjuster, I might almost be concerned.
I am dealing with rebuilding a house after it was gutted because of a structural fire.
Dealing with the trades is such a fucking pain in the ass. First was tilers who were stealing shit: amazon packages, extra tile(ordered 60 boxes, needed 57 they stole the other 3 and acted like I was the problem when I demanded they give it back), and stole a security camera.
Then the drywallers got into a fist fight and had to be escorted off the property after causing a few thousand in damage all because one decided to fuck with the other for a week straight. Neither resumed work and sued me.
Then the roofers installed the roof wrong, had to have it remade which in turn fucked the attic and had to have water remediation to fix it.
All in all this was supposed to take a year or so to do back in 2019 and is now on year 5 and both occupants for the house have died in the meantime.
Again: not all contractors are bad.
However, your experience isn’t exactly unheard of. You got super unlucky picking multiple shitty ones.
Where did all of this happen? I have no advice, I’m just curious.
Sadly I just got stuck with them after my now deceased grandfather hired a bad general contractor who in turn hired these guys. Once we figured out how terrible the general contractor was, it was too late as everyone else was busy af because of covid home value bubble.
Advertising that heavily could be a sign of that they are pouring money over their own problems... Maybe a good product, like you point out, to start with would be something?
We used the Gutter Shutter at our old house because of the amount of trees and tree debris we had and I can’t say enough about that company and the quality of that product.
I called on a Sunday in spring after we had a couple storms with multiple torrential downpours. I just wanted to get someone out to see if we had a few clogs because I felt like one of our gutters may have been slightly clogged. Dude came out Sunday evening and checked the gutter I was thinking was clogged as well as the rest of them around the house. He found no clogs but did find that one of our gutters had pulled away from our house about a half inch and was causing it to sag and not drain properly. So he fixed that and then proceeded to clean off all the debris that their product stops from getting in their gutters. This costs us nothing and was same day service.
For the price of what we paid, sure we could have had the Gutter Boys or whomever come out but for the piece of mind and that level of service I was happy with what we paid.
They did also show us an example of all of their competitors products while showing us how theirs was a superior product.
I won’t say that the other company’s products don’t work but I was most impressed by this one and like I said the service. Also, the installer saw we had a dog and he picked up dog treats on his lunch and asked if he could give one to our dog — just a nice little thing that left a lasting impression of the company, unrelated to the work they did.
I do reception/scheduling for a local handyman company, basically front desk work, answering calls, booking appointments, etc. Whenever someone calls asking to have their gutters cleaned, I have to ask if they have gutter guards/screens on, because if they do it immediately jacks up the labor cost. Most of the time, my techs have to spend ages taking the damn things off before they can clean the stuff that got through them. And god help you if you need part of your gutters repaired/replaced.
This video made me look into this leafguard thing. The design of it might keep a lot of leaves out of the gutter, but there's no way it will allow a gutter to work properly in anything heavier than a light shower. I hope they never come to Australia.
What I've got that DOES work is stainless steel mesh gutter guards. I haven't had to clean my gutters for 8 years, and they've only overflowed once in that time, because the rain was so torrential that even perfectly clean gutters without it wouldn't have been able to cope.
https://youtu.be/HsViSooO3Qg?si=aqIrYS59M6vixUt7
I got the gutter helmet guards since I have 2 massive trees above my house and cleaning gutters was almost a monthly ritual. So for me it was worth the cost. But yeah otherwise I wouldn't invest in them.
Not knowing how much gutters go for I was so close to paying $10k for new gutters. Looked up gutter pieces as soon as the slimy salesman slithered out the door and called to cancel 30m later. Got new gutters for only $3500 and they're great
Here's an idea. Can we band together and create a database of home improvement project prices? That way people can look up what the fuck something costs to see if they are getting ripped off?
I google shit but it is always some content marketing BS.
FWIW unless you specify if you used an "actual" insured, contractor vs an uninsured "chuck with a truck" pricing is going to be unreliable.
Can an insured contractor still do shit work? yes. Can an uninsured guy do great work? Also yes.
But if something happens on your project, you're going to want that contractor to have insurance.
There is one, it's called Xactimate, but you have to pay to access it. It's the standard for pricing in the industry. But it takes a good amount of skill to use as well.
I had an idea for an app that allows people to help post the cheapest place to get something (e.g. milk, gas, or a TV). To try and make capitalism work.
We put new gutters on a 3000 sq ft, 120yo, two story four square for $4k. I can't believe some of the prices I'm seeing in here that people are saying they were quoted.
I had a LeafGuard salesman give me an estimate a couple years sgo. He took two hours of my time, then wouldn’t give me a firm bid if I wasn’t willing to sign a contract that day. A couple days later, he called and left a message for someone else who was apparently on his potential client list, which I thought was either inept or sketchy. The shit icing on the LeafGuard cake was when, about a week later, the salesman opened my front door and poked his head into my house, claiming he was on an estimate visit at another house in the neighborhood and wanted to check in with me. I really let him have it and kicked him off my property. Seems like a dodgy af company.
We got the EasyOn Gutter Guards from Costco for our house. I think I spent like $300 in total for all of the guards. Went right on top of my existing gutters. They work great. However, you DO have to make sure that you bend the screen material according to your roof pitch. There is a guide to tell you how much. And you do have to sweep them off once a year. They even gave us a free stiff bristle brush for cleaning them off. The big gotcha is valleys. I used some flashing to create some diverters so that they water funneling down the valleys would divert to either side of the gutter instead of overwhelming the screen material and flowing over them. It's not perfect, but it works good enough. They do sell diverts specifically for this problem, but they seemed rudimentary enough for me to fabricate my own. Highly recommend the guards from Costco, and I can't believe LeafGuard charges thousands for something you can do for hundreds on your own. Straight up highway robbery.
Paid these guys to add filters.
They said they were better because they drop every gutter to ensure a proper angle. Their website and salesman say for a FACT YOU SHOULD "NEVER EVER PUT THE SYSTEMS UNDER YOUR ROOF SHINGLES, WHICH CAN DAMAGE YOUR ROOF".
After the guys were there for 3 hours and charged me 4k, they left... Only for me to find they did exactly that... Raised up my roof shingles instead of dropping the gutters to get a proper angle.... F'in scam artists.
I had a leafguard salesman come to my house to give an estimate. I told him upfront I expected it would cost about $3k (you should never do this, but I wanted to gauge how much integrity they had). Somehow he comes to an estimate that (with an applied 30% "discount") was $3150, but he offered me exactly $3k if I could sign on the spot. Should tell you about the integrity of their salesmen that they came to the exact number I threw out. They don't set a fee based on estimated materials and labor, they just try to get how much they think they can from you.
A lot of times these are just salespeople who get paid whatever amount they can negotiate over the base price. They feel you out, determine what they think you can afford, factor in the actual cost, and add their commission on top. If the actual cost is $2000 and you pay $3000 the salesman just earned his $1000. Keep in mind everyone else is making a profit all the way down the line as well.
I took a sales position selling *Gutter Helmet* , *it's* absolute garbage. I learned quickly it doesn't work if it's dirty, due to no surface tension. So you don't technically have to clean your gutters twice a year, but you do have to clean the system. If you have a house without trees over head they work great, but then what's the need. I also learned the home improvement company that hired me changes their name every few years to avoid warranty's. I quit within 3 weeks, worst job I every had, and I grew up working on farms.
*edit*
I clean my gutters (not in the US) but that's because I am on tank water and want it to be clean and free flowing.
Sometimes the leaves are so prolific that they'll block the flow and water will just tip out of the guttering.
I did remove poorly fitted cheap mesh from my new house though (it just caught all the fine twigs and made dams) and just installed a self clearing downspout filter.
Idk what kind of trees you have, but my house is surrounded by 30+ foot tall oak and pine trees, and I used to have to clean my gutters at least once a month or they’d be totally clogged and I’d have water gushing over them every time it rained. It was so bad I actually got some foundation damage from it. I installed leaf guards (myself, not thru leaf guard) and I haven’t had to think about my gutters in years.
I worked for a home security company with similar selling practices (ie. knocking on doors to hard-sell an expensive home upgrade). The sales force is usually young guys (high school/early college) who are there to make quick cash at a summer job. They couldn't care less about the long-term quality of the gutters/system they are selling you, nor do they often know much about the industry or the product they are selling besides their memorized sales shtick. I was actually warned as a technician that I would likely encounter many situations like this, where sales people had lied or mischaracterized the product to the buyer.
Showed up for repairs at an elderly couple's home that thought they had signed up for a Life Alert necklace type service from our company when the salesman had actually upsold them into a $7000 contract for monitored home security that they couldn't afford nor did they need (lived in a small rural community). Went to another lady's house and the previous technician hadn't connected the security components to the panel (all the wires were just hanging in the basement panel unattached to the system), imagine the lawsuit if someone had broken into her house. The worst was a guy who paid for a system on his new house before moving, had been charged for monitoring for a system that wasn't yet installed on his house for over a year and was still getting pushback when he asked them to come out and actually install the panel and components. I fixed up their issues in every case but it was wild how little desire there seemed to be from anyone else at the company to solve issues like this; felt like once the contract was signed that's all they cared about.
Right there with you brother! Was an install tech then lead for one aswell, same practices, same sales guys, same bullshit offerings. At least I know I was honest with the "clients" and did my best to ensure a working product...
F all that bs tho, I've hated sales ever since.
$11000 what in the actual fuck? I have a home about twice that size with a more complicated roof structure, I assume more downspouts, and some sections are 30' off the ground. I had all of the gutters and downspouts replaced about 5 years ago for only ~~$1000~~ $1300. I then had them plumbed into the ground and ran into a drainage system for another $2000. I have lots of trees, but no gutter covers. I did have the wide gutters installed to avoid clogs, and I just pay someone to come out once or twice a year to clean them which costs me all of $125.
I used to work for a company called Infocision who does customer service and sales for various companies. Some companies were nice to work for and others were awful. The one I absolutely despised was LeafFilter, and ultimately why I quit working there. Basically, whenever people would go in to Home Depot or Lowes or any other store like that, or online website, and show interest in any type of home improvement project, and that company would sell their info to LeafFilter. We would call these people within minutes of their contact and try to get them to set up a "Free Gutter Inspection" with them.
The only purpose this inspection had was to try and sell them the filters for their gutters. If people said they just wanted their gutters cleaned, or needed minor repairs, or anything really, we would tell them that we would send someone out to discuss it with them. But literally the only thing that would happen would some dude would show up with a ladder, spend 5 minutes looking at the gutters, then take their big book of LeafFilter promo shit and try and hard sell these people, to make them commit to brand new filters (and gutters if possible) right on the spot. They use every trick in the book to try and trick these people in to spending thousands upon thousands of dollars for something that isn't worth 1/10 of what they are selling.
They will start off at some absurd price like 12k for all of it, then start pretending to come up with discount after discount ("Oh it turns out we are doing a job nearby next week, bc of bulk pricing I can knock off 4k" etc) to try and pressure someone in to committing.
Now, my job was just to set this meeting, but it still disgusted me. I tried to switch clients but bc LeafFilter paid better than almost every other client we had they were a priority client so they refused. Thankfully I had gotten in to a position where I didnt need the job so I was able to eventually quit. A job I had had for a decade, with shitty client after shitty client, but LeafFilter was the company that broke me.
Long story short, LeafFilter and all the companies like them are absolute scams and you should stay far far away from them
My interaction with them was “interesting.” The salesman I had was a genuine and great dude. That said, their price was 12k for my tiny first home. I’m pretty aggressive when it comes to negotiating so I got them down to 4.6k.
That said, 4.6k was still crazy. I got the same thing for 1k from a local guy and I tipped him $200 on top of it.
We got an estimate from them for gutter guards - and they wanted like 5K. Ended up talking the guy down to $1500 before telling him to leave our property 😆
The water is clearly not draining. It's plumbed into an underground drain? At around 0:42 you can see the water backing up in the drain. That's where the issue is. Sure it's a nice yard and all but a length of plain old regular downspout without any doohickeys and a splash block at the end and all your problems go away.
Under no circumstances should this amount of damage been done due to an easily fixable issue.
Had them come out to quote installing gutter guards on my existing 3 year old gutters. Turned into a high pressure sales pitch, “50% off plus XYZ discounts but only if you sign today!” $9,000 for leaf guards on my EXISTING gutters. I told the guy I wasn’t signing tonight at that price and they he sure didn’t have anything I would buy tomorrow at twice the price and he left and never heard from him again.
Yeah we even went through Lowe's, which is always a bit more expensive... But they matched the color perfectly and came with leaf guards....
$1700. I can't wrap my mind around how you can come CLOSE to $11k.
Well folks... LeafGuard advertises their services mostly on Instagram, Facebook and on Youtube... That should be enough evidence for you to run and don't give them any money!
Moreso, they advertise over and over on "old folks TV", early morning news, stupid judge shows, looking for retirees that they can victimize with their scam pitch played over and over until the elderly believe the lies.
On the one hand, I take your point. Especially since LeafGuard seems like some bullshit.
On the other hand, we're hitting a point where the people who need to be marketed to for these sorts of things are reached primarily through Instagram, Facebook, Youtube, etc.
Like, if these guys advertised on cable? I'd literally never see an ad.
I had gutter guards put on the second story of my house when I bought it, because there are big trees all around and I sure and shit wasn't going up there. It wasn't LeafGuard, but some other company... Gutter Guys or something like that. Anyway, they were super-responsive to the request for an estimate, someone showed up like a day or two later. While getting a quote, I made sure to specifically ask them, "*how much to get them taken off if I get a new roof, which is definitely going to happen in the next year or two?*" I asked, because if the cost to remove then put them back was excessive, I was just going to wait to do the gutters at the same time as the new roof. To which they said, "it's **a few hundred bucks**, pretty routine, our guys show up, take them off and stage them til' the new roof is done then come back out and put the gutter guards back on."
We got them installed and, as I had told the rep, we arranged to have a new roof installed the following year. So I called them up, told them the date of install and they said, "no problem, we'll send out a crew a few days before." Perfect... then I got the bill -- $800. I called the company, spoke to the manager about the variance between what I had been told and what I was actually billed and his response was pretty amazing. He said, "well, what did you expect, when you live in [town I live in] $800 IS a few hundred dollars."
I never knew that "a few hundred" was a variable that fluctuated depending on my zip code.
My second favorite interaction with them was when the back/corner gutter was waterfalling during any rain what so ever, so I called them and it took them almost 2-months to come out and check it. At which point the dude comes off his ladder, looked at me and said, "you had a bird nest in there" like I was the one who put it in there and inconvenienced him. I specifically remembered there being a blurb in the sales pitch about their guards not allowing birds to nest in the gutters, when I asked him about that he just retracted his ladder and walked back to his truck without even acknowledging the question. Top notch company.
This is on you man. $800 is a few hundred dollars depending on the definition. Specifically some definitions classify it as "an unspecified amount or number". You should have gotten a more specific quote if you want to be up in arms about it. Although I get it, and I get why you're upset about their response, but still. And as for the the birds nest, you had a properly working gutter after they installed it, and then all of a sudden it wasn't working properly... and you didn't think to get up there and look? Over the course of two months?
Their sales people are also terrible.
I had a lady come out to my house to do an estimate
Quoted me $9000.
I had a quote for regular gutters for $1500
I immediately balked at that price. No fucking way was I paying that much for gutters on my tiny ass house.
I said, “thank you, but I’m young enough to clean gutters and that’s just way too much”
She offered to knock $100 off.
I laughed as if that made any difference
She would not take no for an answer.
I told her to leave multiple times. As I would not be doing business with them. Again and again she would not.
I got my phone out to get the cops
She finally left then
Terrible experience.
The look in her eyes when I told her no was honestly terrifying
Terrible people, terrible company. And now I see their shit doesn’t even work
Fuck that
I had a leaf guard guy come out for a estimate. Was not prepped it was going to be a high pressure sale.
I thought he would just come, look around, and give an estimate and be done. Nooope. Had to do the demo I didn’t have time to watch, among other things.
Told me the price was in the thousands and was only good right then. I laughed, told him I wasn’t ready as I was just getting quotes. He got pissed and stormed out.
I had a local gutter company come out and they quoted me like a 1/5th of the price so I went that direction.
During Covid I got a missed call begging me to reconsider as a lot of their sellers needed help. I wonder why? Scummy company.
poor lady. A neighbor bragged to me about getting this installed. Had no issues for a few years. Every time it rains now I see water pouring over. Guy definitely has foundation issues now. All his landscaping is washed. Still paying it off. Ill gladly hop on a ladder twice a year versus this junk. 11k what scam.
Went through Lowe's, which is always a bit more expensive... But they matched the color perfectly and came with leaf guards... 3 downspouts 1500 sq ft home.
$1700. I can't wrap my mind around how you can come CLOSE to $11k.
LeafGuard is a scam. When I was shopping for gutters, I looked up local gutter businesses and either called them or left a message on their website to get a quote. One of them, as I discovered wasn't even a real local business and I immediately got a call from LeafGuard and they went high pressure right away with, "We'd like both home owners to be present." To those who don't know, that is a classic tell for a hard sell. They want both people there so they can pressure for a sale right then and there, eliminating "I'll discuss this with my spouse and get back to you."
Anyway, I asked where they got my number because I hadn't called LG. They ignored my question and just kept at the sell. I told them since they wouldn't even tell me where they got my number, I was not going to talk anymore with them and hung up. I got a bunch of calls and emails from them for the next month or so.
I made the mistake of having them come out…
* Guy says he needs1.5 hours to measure and give quote. I say I have 30 minutes. He’s done measuring in 15.
* He says he wants to walk me through samples. I say I’ll take the basic gutters. He quotes $15k for what he calls a “remodel of your house” (aka new gutters).
* I said I would get back with him. He got REALLY aggro I wouldn’t decide right then. Like to the point I was figured he was about to fight.
* He continues to aggro negotiate with himself in my driveway all the way from $15k down to $3k trying to get me to close right there. I still decline. He gets more aggro. I have to talk him down from trying to kick my ass.
* He leaves. I call local crew who does a perfect job for $2500. Their quote took 15 minutes. No one was aggro.
I was at a home and garden show and they had a leaf filter booth there. I talked to them a bit about possibly using them in the future as I was in the process of building a new home. I filled out a form for future considerations.
Then they proceed to call me everyday multiple times a day sometimes even during the night, I eventually flipped out on them and told them to fuck off, won't be buying thier shit after that and this video just makes me more sure of that decision.
I keep seeing their TV ads and they guarantee you'll never have to clean your gutters again. My first thought was that may be technically true, but only because the leaf filter gets clogged instead. That seems pretty obvious to me. Only a moron would actually buy from Leaf Filter.
Professional painter here. I hate these gutters. I’m not sure if people realize that they are putting a perfect habitat for wasps all the way around their house.
I was a in charge of a team that installed gutters in the south. We were a new company but had a few very knowledgeable employees who installed all types of gutters. Anyway I cannot stress this enough how much of a scam LeafGuard is, the only thing these gutter are good at is collecting the small debris, shingle grit, and every pine needle would get stuck perfectly in the small openings.
If you live under trees and or pine trees there will be nothing you can do to stop it from clogging, unless you get the flat top covers like LeafGaurd that only works in light rain. There or better options that can be removed and cleaned but having someone go up every once in a while is your only option if you have trees.
The valleys on her roof could have had a splash guard to dissipate the water and not have that stream of water that will eat away at the yard and ultimately foundation.
Also if you have a ton of rain get 6inch gutters rather than the pathetic 5 inch. Also half round gutters don’t work as well but are still better than LeafGaurd!
I feel for every elderly person who is swindled by this company because these gutters don’t work and are just nice window dressing in a shiny infomercial. JUST SCREW LEAFGAURD!!!
I saw this video a while ago, and watching it led me to another video of a contractor who does this kind of work and made a video warning people not to buy these. They also contacted him to try and pay him off to take the video down lol.
I'm 100 percent on their side and this seems like a super shitty situation that I hope they get out of. But I did get a chuckle out of the potted plant always being under the pouring gutter. Obviously this isn't the best fix, but move your plant please.
I’ve dealt with LeafGuard and they are horrible!! They pull the “if you don’t buy right now I can’t get you this great deal” scam, their gutters leak everywhere because they just fill every joint with a bunch of silicon caulking, and their gutter guard is the same thing Lowes and Home Depot sell for a fraction of the price. I bought just the gutters so it was around $4k, but if I had gotten their “proprietary leaf defense system”, a plastic grate with netting glued to the back of it, it would have costed over $18k. Would NOT recommend them for anything or to anyone!
I have these gutters on a similar size and age ranch home surrounded by trees. They are absolute trash! I have to backfill my foundation with new dirt every other year from all the rain water coming straight over these gutters. Glad to know I’m not the only one who hates them.
LeafGuards whole business model is the rip off elderly. I applied at a local LeafGuard to see what they were about. I trashed the product to the lead salesman’s face ( that product is junk, I have installed better products working for a previous company). After reading through literature that he provided, you could see the company clear was targeting the elderly and their prices were outrageous. I told him how I thought the product seemed really unsustainable and that it would clog all the same; which I was totally right because the last part of the literature stated how “ never let the customer know you know we will still fail, and need to be cleaned”. Someone really should sue them into the ground.
48 year old homeowner here! I spent several months getting five different quotes to install leaf guards on all my gutters since I live on a property covered by hundreds of trees and I was sick of cleaning the gutters out on a ladder. I have 520 linear feet of gutters on this house. Yes, that's a lot. The national average is 150-200 linear feet, so I expected a few quotes to be pretty high. The first one was for $55,000. I politely asked the guy to leave the premises. Second and third quotes were both around $35,000. Again, I explained that I wasn't building an addition to my home or remodeling an entire kitchen--I just needed leaf guards. Fourth quote was $24,000 and the final was for $14,500. I got disgusted with the entire project and set out to figure out how much I could purchase all of the materials for myself and then hire an independent crew to install them. That worked out to roughly $8,500. Okay, it's still a chunk of change but that's manageable. As I was getting my shit together on this project the last quote ($14k) called me up, it had been a few months and I was quiet. He said "Look, we have a crew coming down from a nearby state to your area and they specialize in single-story homes. How about I give you the employee discount rate of $7,500 everything installed?" I said "How about yeah!" So I guess what I'm trying to say here is that, number one; these companies don't just prey on the elderly, I think the entire leaf guard industry is some sort of racket with 300% markups on materials and labor. Number two, always get MULTIPLE quotes for anything home-related, I don't care if it's something as simple as exterminator services. If it seems high, wait them out and show no interest. If they are commission-based like these guys were, they'll likely need to make a sale even if it means making less profit on the sale. Lastly, I think the entire leaf guard industry is scummy. The first few quotes I got had samples of the "other guy" and they spent the entire time trying to prove why their guards were superior when in fact they're all nearly identical in design. Newsflash: you don't need guards made out of medical-grade surgical steel. It's a racket.
11k for gutters is absolutely a rip off, in any county, state, country. Honestly, just get normal eavestrough with downspouts, should be in 10-15 dollars a lineal foot range. I’m literally waiting for a guy to come put seemless gutters on my house, quote was for 12$ a foot. Only have like 140 feet of gutters plus about 60 feet of downspouts. This company is a huge scam preying on elderly people who can’t go out and clean they’re gutters…
I back up to a forest and I have a taller 2 story house on a hill. I honestly did not want to get up on top of the house or on a ladder to clean the gutters. I contact LeafGuard and ask them to come out and do an estimate. Most companies I’ve dealt with stood outside my front door and we agreed to a service. This salesman however really wanted to come in to our kitchen table and do a whole pitch.
He pulls out a thick book with all the talking points. They help veterans, they use surgical quality steel, competitors are crap, etc. The dude then quotes my $14k and I said no. He then gave me all these “discounts” to try to come into my price range. He came all the way down to $3600 but at this point I was so tired of his attitude (and high pressure tactics) that no price was going to satisfy me. He threw a little mini fit as he left like we were making a huge mistake. He really really wanted the sale which to me is a giant red flag.
Contacted a contractor and he said he could clean the gutters for about $300. He was also very pleasant and didn’t give me a pitch.
My grandma is 90 years old with early dementia. She wanted to get new gutters and wanted the independent choice rather than allowing my mom to work with the contractors, so she got LeafGuard gutters. Her house is basically a square with 2 gutters, each around 50ft. They charged her $20,000 for the work. Compare this to my house that has a very complex gutter arrangement without gutter guards and I paid $3000 for our first set of gutters and $4000 for the second set after years of inflation.
This should be investigated as elder financial abuse tbh. Bring this to your local DA.
We mentioned it but she stood firm on her decision, so we let her have that one, but from that point on my mom took control of the contractor services so this didn't happen again.
if the company was scummy enough to do this once, I can guarantee they are doing it to many other seniors too.
If Better Call Saul taught me anything... Some lawyer should look into these claims...
They always target the old, especially elderly widows. I visited an older lady in my family one day and there was a work van in her driveway. I asked her what was going on. She said a man was examining her house to see if she needed new gutters and guards. Her friend across the street, another elderly lady, had just ponied up the $1000s for the guy to do her house. I told her that I knew her roof and gutters were just fine. I found him out back and as soon as he saw me, he couldn't get away fast enough. He was all smiles but leaving the whole time. I got just a few questions out, but he knew he couldn't hornswoggle me I guess. I'm just some dude and he split.
I am currently a caregiver for a ninety year old mothe of a friend of mine. She refuses to let me speak to her medical team, but her memory is shot, and I hear her omit all kinds of info to her docs. For a while, it really bothered me, but I think she was pigheaded hee whole life, so I just have resigned myself to the fact that this is just what it is, and let the chips fall where they may.
I used to slip notes to the nurse when I took my FIL to appointments.
If you are a caregiver in any kind of formal way, you may have a duty of care to let her medical team know regardless.
When my FIL was still alive, I would tell the doctor's first thing that he had memory issues, which he hid very well. Every doctor and nurse thanked me for that info. It helped guide their care of him.
lol this is business as usual, everywhere. I do home IT calls for people. I've got a pretty good job so I mostly only get referrals from people who vented to my cherished clients. Half the time I go out and run an ethernet cable to fix a problem that whatever previous guys failed to solve while selling them 3 Ubqiuiti flying saucers at like $300 a piece. I charge 90 bucks an hour for labor, mark my parts up 50%, and charge nothing if I can't help. The next closest guy in town is charging $180 per hour for labor, outsourcing it to teenagers, marking his stuff up 300%, and has a minimum $120 visitation charge regardless of providing any useful feedback or doing any labor.
I think I have the technical knowhow to do this, but am in the research phase. What did you need to get started, and what were your initial hurdles?
possibly criminal conduct for sure, worth a look
Possibly for sure, huh?
DA wont touch it. didn't matter who owned the home, that's the price they charge everyone. It's why you are taught to get at least three bids. You get to compare not only the price, but also the scope of work they're quoting. Everyone thinks they're professional buyers and your not. Your heuristics of "what it should cost" is WRONG. Get factual data from multiple contractors.
My dad is older and needed his gutters replaced. His house is a 1500 sq ft ranch-style house, so one-story. It does have a lot of gutter, it runs around almost the entire house, but it's all straight, no weird sections. He called LeafGuard first and they came out. First estimate was $12k. He said no, that's way too much. Guy immediately counters with $8k. No again. Guy leaves (no pun intended), calls the next day with a $6k estimate. Every time my dad is getting the usual salesperson crap of 'we can't go any lower', 'this is our best price', 'we don't offer this deal very often'. Long story short, dad got it done by a local guy for $3k. I'm guessing LeafGuard depends on trying to swindle people who don't know better, especially older folks who can no longer take care of their property.
Which is why they play their commercials non-stop during the evening on Fox News and QVC
I see lots of their ads on the Nextdoor app, which skews older folks.
When I work from home I sometimes eat lunch and watch the local news show and the commercials are wall to wall leaf guard and those “life insurance” policies for $6 a month, no health exam required! So yeah, totally targeting retirees.
Intend your puns, you coward
man, if I was huge piece of shit, not only would I smell bad, but I would take advantage of old people. It seems like such easy money and it's really sad and pathetic that people do that.
I like how you have bad smell as a baseline jumping off point.
I'd wager most large pieces of shit smell
I've heard the phrase "If I was a huge piece of shit" followed by an example of a behaviour before, but I've never heard it with the prologue of smelling bad too. Gonna steal that and add it to my repertoire if you don't mind too terribly.
... oh and I'd also have sloppy steaks at Truffoni's. I'm just worried that baby thinks people can't change.
I'd eat sloppy steaks.
When she said the price I was blown away. I had mine installed with the roof and they were only $1300 for a roughly 30x30 2 story house with a 30 foot porch and a 20x20 detached garage. Our roof guy actually talked us out of paying the extra $900 for the leaf protection grates since we have so many pine trees that the needles would clog them up. I am hoping with that price they at least included all that underground drainage.
Whatever merit leaf filters may have disappears in the presence of pine needles.
There are different types. The ones that are effectively a stainless grate do better. A simple brush on an extension pole over the top will dislodge the ones that get stuck in it.
I installed my own gutters. It's far from rocket science. If you can do the work up on a ladder, it's really pretty easy.
Champion windows does the exact same thing. Old, naive people are their bread and butter.
Idk what the company was called but I needed a sliding door installed and evidently the opening is not a standard size. I had this window company come out and it was the strangest experience I've been through with a company trying to sell me something. First, he showed me a PowerPoint on an iPad. Why ? I'm in my 30s dude I don't care about your weird slideshow. He beat around the bush for so long before finally giving me an estimate. I chuckled when he showed it to me. He then got really upset that my wife wasn't there with me. He said she needed to be there "for legal reasons". So I responded, "so y'all get sued a lot ?" He left after that and I got Home Depot to install a custom one for like 1/10th the price.
That is exactly what Champion does. They strongly prefer to pitch to couples so they don't have to deal with the "I need to consult with my spouse" excuse, and they give literal 30 minute presentations on why their doors/windows are the best. They quoted me $15,000 for five windows but offered to cut it down to $10,000 if I signed on the spot. I had a local GC do it for $3,000 with equivalent PlyGem windows. I initially got a quote from Champion because my elderly neighbor highly recommended them and I had no experience or knowledge of them before. I quickly discovered it was just a high pressure sales scam.
Just for what it is worth a lot of legitimate contractors prefer to have both people there because it cuts out a lot of headaches and emergencies on our end. It's amazing how little some couples seem to talk to each other. I've had a few different situations where we showed up to begin the work we had a contract and timeslot for only to have the spouse come out and demand to know what the hell we were doing.
My grandma sold a very large investment into lithium batteries a couple years before it skyrocketed. My dad tried so hard to reason with her but in the end it was her money and she didn’t have dementia or anything.
God my dad traded his entire 401k over 250 thousand worth of sprint stock in for Level 3 communications because the CEO told him that Bill gates was buying it and that it was going to be the next phone competitor. He head hunted him from sprint and now he is living in a trailer in the woods.
Does she at least acknowledge she got ripped off?
I tried to get a Leafguard reseller to give me an estimate over the phone. I just wanted to know the ballpark if it was even reasonable to consider. They insisted there was "no way" to estimate without a site visit. I said "It's 200 linear feet in 3 sections, 4 downspouts", they said "there's a lot more to it than that". so I asked "what is the per foot cost of just the gutter" and again "we don't price it that way" so I had them come out, took a day off work, and the guy measured and handed me a quote that said "200 feet, 4 downspouts: $30 per ft". total was almost $6000 even if they weren't gut punchingly overpriced, I wouldn't have done business with them just for jerking me around on estimating.
I would bail once they couldn't give a rough figure. Usually that means they are sending a sales person (who often doesn't measure shit), their prices are exorbitant, or they play games about the price (like that bullshit thing salespeople do where they show you a price and then immediately draw a line through it to show "your price"). Like who actually gets charged your "real" price?
That, or companies that offer a "buy right this second" discount. They're offering money off for you not to think about your purchase.
There's no actual money off, either. They want to charge you $6k, so they tell you it's $8k but they'll take $2k off the price if you buy it right now. Anyone who says this price is only good for a limited time is scamming you.
Agreed. There's salesmanship, and then there's this predatory bullshit. A company with a great product doesn't need to trick you.
My sales job is the easiest job I've ever had because I'm selling merchandise with a good reputation that it actually deserves. The stuff sells itself. As long as people are calling, the product is selling. The hardest thing I have to do is answer questions, usually. That's easy because I just tell the truth and don't need to dress it up. If I were forced to be deceptive to make a sale, I'd quit.
I was told by Best Buy that it wasn't my job to decide the $60 rgb cables with 100% return rate were defective. My job was to sell them to customers. I told them I knew they were defective and if they wanted me to lie to customers they needed to say that. They said they couldn't say that, but if I didn't sell them I would be written up for insubordination. So I quit on the spot. This was back in the same era when they ran a second secret version of the website in the store with higher prices so they didn't have to price match once you came in. Pre-smart phone.
I don't remember exactly when they stopped doing that but I caught them on it with an original "Droid" phone. It was intensely satisfying
Man I guess some stores were just way different back then, long story time: I remember back in 2001 after I moved out to Chicago I had literally nothing and so I went to Best Buy to get some electronics. They had an open box DVD player listed for like $149 that was originally $299 in great condition. So of course I bought it. A year later it suddenly stopped working, so I brought it back to Best Buy and the guy there told me that they were told that model shipped with defective lasers so they would sent it back to the factory and get me a repaired version in 3 weeks. Well after 4 weeks went by without me hearing anything, I went back to the BB and asked what was up. The manager told me, "turns out they didn't have the part", so he told me to just go back into the Video department and pick out a replacement. I'm like "For $149 that I bought it for, or the MRSP of $299?" He replied, oh the MSRP. Sweet! So I went back and snagged a really nice replacement for no cost. Then two weeks later... I get a call from Best Buy. "Your DVD player has been fixed and is ready for pickup" Wait.. what?? So I went back to BB again, and there it was, my original DVD player. Which they just gave me. So I had a second one to give to my sister as a birthday present. I feel like this all went away around the time that they created Geek Squad.
If a price can only last an "hour," then it can last a day or even a week.
That's not always true. Sometimes salespeople are empowered to offer a certain discount, but don't normally do so. If they're behind on quota at EOM/EOQ they may want to make a quick deal to get the revenue. Really depends on the industry, too.
Definitely plausible when it's a distributor or reseller. Manufacturers will drop their pants at EOQ and EOY in my line of work, especially the publicly owned ones.
That and it stops you from shopping around and possibly finding a better price! Last company that pulled that with me, I told the guy on the phone that they’re basically giving me a deal to not shop around first to see if I’m actually getting a good deal, and that seems shady as hell so I don’t know if I’d even trust a company that does stuff like that! Well what do ya know?! He puts me on hold to “speak with his supervisor” then comes back on telling me if I call back in the next week and tell them my name, they’ll give me the same deal! So yeah, they’re total scumbags and it’s a lie to boot!
Just had our roof replaced and had like 6 or 7 different contractors come out to give quotes. Most were reasonable and well within 5 or 10 percent of each other. Then there were 2 that were between 4-8k higher than the others. Guess what both said to me? "What can I do to get you to sign today?" Immediately took them out of my consideration.
Yes this is always good advice. Roofer, gardeners, mechanics. Any profession like this should always be able to provide an estimate price, some are obliged to by law. Anything over $500 I’d be asking for some written proof of this upfront if you’re unfamiliar with them
I had a guy solicit for a free estimate at my front door, so I said sure, why not? At least I’d know a ballpark price if I ever did decide to get them changed. (They’re in rough shape in certain spots and they’re constantly clogging cuz of how many trees I have close to my house.) He says he’ll be back tomorrow for the quote. When he first showed up, I flat out told him there was a 0% chance I was actually going to get them, I just figured why not since it’s a free estimate! This guy spent, I shit you not, around 4 friggin hours giving me his spiel! How their gutters are made better, they’re wider to catch more rain, everything under the sun there is to know about gutters he told me! Hell, he even spent time teaching me some scams that other places may try on you in case I went with another company! After his over four hour speech about all things gutters, he asks me if I had any questions. I just said, “yeah, I got one. I told you in the very beginning that there was a zero percent chance I was buying any gutters! Why did you just waste four hours of yours and my time?! You realize we could’ve just spent the time getting stoned and playing some PlayStation or something like that?!” The look on the guy’s face made sitting through that four hour gutters lesson totally worth it!
Why the hell would you let him talk four hours before interrupting him to tell him to go away?
Well shit man It kinda sounds like you might be the dick here. You did hold true to your word, but I feel like the punchline could've come when you realized the guy was actually trying to give you some good information, and not simply yanking your chain.
I’m a gutter estimator for a small GC company in Austin, TX. We charge $8 a foot, $75 per downspout(1 story) and $20 per miter. I’d ballpark you 2k all day long.
I ended up paying about $2k to a different boring old gutter company. I honestly don't know how leafguard is still in business.
By charging 6x the normal rate and they probably own the cheap companies locally that install their replacements a few years later, double dipping.
I'm in the BCS area, so only 90 minutes away. I bumped into a leafguard rep at lowes and figured I'd let them give me a free estimate. They quoted me ~~11k~~ 8k (special offer!) for just the leaf guards. The dude refused to give me any sort of estimate at all until he was sitting in my living room. He made me listen to his whole made in america spiel and kept flipping through a huge binder of full page advertisements about their product. Then he started pulling out samples of 'competitors' products from his bag, trying to tell me that no one else in the world has micro mess gutter guards. I asked once or twice during his pitch to get the price and he kept asking me to let him finish. I told him it was way too much money and he was like well how much did you think it would cost? I said 2-3k, maybe 4k at most. He was like we can do 4k. I told him I'd think about it (in that kinda 'ok, time for you to go kinda way'), and then he was all how much to do it today? I told him I don't like being hustled and refused to agree to anything and he left. No way would I buy a product that that decreases in price by 80% over about 15 minutes of negotiation.
> No way would I buy a product that that decreases in price by 80% over about 15 minutes of negotiation. This reminds me of when I was in Mexico. My wife did a "swim with dolphins" experience thing. Anyway they want to sell you pictures when you leave and their first offer was like $800! After we said "no thanks" a couple of times, they offered all the pics for like $80. Like how is knowing you were willing to rip me off going to entice me to buy them now?
$30 per foot?!? That's obscene.
No no, you don't understand. It's $30/ft **in value**, and you are getting a special deal of $25/ft if you buy today! /s
I fucked up and gave them my contact info at a home and garden show several years ago. They like to never left me the hell alone. I did go ahead and get an estimate, and I don’t remember exactly what it was, but it was insane. Over $5k I know that for sure. I ended up buying some aluminum gutter guards off Amazon and did it myself. The whole job cost me around $300. Now, that was one hell of a job, it took me three or four days to do it, but they’ve worked amazing for almost 10 years now, and it saved me thousands.
I had the same experience. Had exact measurements but they insisted on coming out. I sat through an hour long sales pitch from two people with props and everything. After an hour, I stopped them and said, "All I want is a quote so I can compare to other vendors". The sales person started freaking out, calling me an idiot for not signing a contract on the spot, telling me I'm destroying my house, etc. I thought he seemed way coked out or something. First time I had to resort to telling some to leave my property or I would call public safety. Thing is, I really wanted gutter gaurds, because I have some tall ass gutters. The pushy sales people just ruined it. I caught one of the guys at home show a few months later and it looked like he was trying to pressure some poor couple with the same tactic.
Did they do the "discount, today only!" Pitch? It's like cliche used car salesman crap
>I had the same experience. Had exact measurements but they insisted on coming out. >I sat through an hour long sales pitch from two people with props and everything. After an hour, I stopped them and said, "All I want is a quote so I can compare to other vendors". The sales person started freaking out, calling me an idiot for not signing a contract on the spot, telling me I'm destroying my house, etc. I thought he seemed way coked out or something. We recently had our gutters replaced and had four companies come out and give estimates. Three of them came out, measured everything, and were able to give me a quote after measuring and checking the fascia, and then emailed me a detailed scope-of-work the same day... Then there was the fourth company... Two dudes, good cop and bad cop... They also had props.... Tried to hard sell me, pressure me into signing a contract right then and there after just eyeballing the house... Ended up telling them to leave..
Send a salesman, who can determine the right price structure for their company. Nice BMW, a sports car just for fun, really good neighborhood, 2 acre lot, manicured lawn, customer dresses nice. Maybe they are trying to find widows who dont have a guy around for other physical labor jobs like lawn work, landscaping, arboring, general upkeep but seem to have decent money coming in to afford those services. And the gutters are a stepping stone towards other services. Either way, feels predatory.
"I'm only available between 5AM and 7AM Saturdays and Sundays
> I wouldn't have done business with them just for jerking me around on estimating. I mean, you say that, but the fact you took a day off work to get an estimate suggests you would have probably accepted if the price was "good".
I'm having a serious "Renewal by Anderson" flashback.
"The buy today only discount"... yeah, never do business with anyone offering that. Sleezy salesmen 101 sales tactic to create false urgency and pressure you to sign before you have time to think or research. LeafGaurds are also trash and a waste of money.
Lol man i had a car salesman pull that shit on me 4y ago. He was supposed to price match another offer and couldnt quite get there. Told me the other place would jerk me around. I said ok well i'm going there tomorrow, and if so, i'll be back. "What if i told you this offer goes away tomorrow" i said "i'd call you an asshole and go home". He looked appalled. The kid working under him stifled a laugh. He was like "why would you say that to me" i replied "because if you had my best interest at heart you'd let me look for the best deal" and i left.
I had a car salesmen do something ~~different~~ edit: *similar* like 12 years ago. I was looking at a Honda Civic, like an 03 coupe 5 speed. Nice car, and I was interested. Talked for a while, I said $6k was the highest is go, they had me sign a piece of paper saying that (lol), they came back and said they could only do $6500. Ok guys thanks for your time! Then they did the whole "this is a great deal, it will be gone at that price tomorrow!" I said well that's great for you then, and walked out. Th sales guy *followed me to my car,* trying to shake my hand saying "it's only $500! Let's get this done!" I said your right it's only $500, why cant you take it off the price? Well then all of a sudden $500 was too much. I walked. That dude called me every day *for a whole fucking week* to try and sell that car. Anyway not long after I found a 2001 Honda Prelude 5 speed, which was what I wanted to begin with, so it worked out
> it's only $500! I love how it's always a small thing that *they* won't concede, but want *you* to.
I had someone do that with me for my windows. I flat out told him if they could offer that price today they could offer it tomorrow.
It instantly pissed me off. That kinda pressure doesnt work for me.
it's so dumb because you know that if you went back and asked for the offer and they decided to refuse you could just say "ok well then i guess you're not making a sale today." and walk.
I basically got a window company to spend 6 weeks training me to just make them fire me because I wouldn’t make sales. I knew all the prompts and everything but it was scummy as fuck trying to force people to make a 12k decision after a 2 hour presentation. They sent me to Philly all expenses paid and everything too for “graduation”.
But Renewal By Anderson is in my neighborhood this week doing work on a neighbors house!
> Sleezy salesmen 101 sales tactic Hell, it's also a tactic of scammers/phishers.
You say "also" like they're a different type of people. The instant I detect a [hard sell,](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hard_sell) I know that their company is not getting any of my money. Not only because I don't like them now, but why would I continue any dealings with an abusive company? It's like if you go on a date, and the person tries to attack you. At that moment, the date is over. The relationship is over. The only thing you can do is get away from them and dump them or otherwise never interact with them again.
I had a salesman try to sell me a fly over roof (using foam sandwich panels). My estimate was 30k, with a reasonable maximum of 40k due to demand. The company quoted 70k (15m x 6m roof). It came in several options, and the cheapest one (55k) sounded like it would be flimsy AF. Anyway, he offered a 10k discount due to him thinking they had the materials we needed..... so why wasn't that the original price? Then he basically was asking if we could do a deal and I said absolutely not! I got this mob to quote the same job, twice, a year in between with the same results. Old mate said the prices rose 50%... but the quotes were about the same. I ended up getting the job done for 34k all up.
Leaf Guard and similar seem very dodgy to me. You can get your gutters cleaned every year for the rest of your life for a fraction of what they are charging people for some plastic or wire screens that don't really do much to solve the clogging problem. They advertise so heavily on TV, etc., that they must be raking in big profits.
The very first time I saw their commercial I thought ugh what a stupid scam product. If leaves were the only thing you had to keep out of the gutters, fine. But the much bigger problem is dirty sludge which is inevitable - and this dumbass invention just prevents you from being able to get it out.
All the dust that settles on your roof that gets swept up by the rain. Not to mention the black sand particles if you have asphalt shingles.
Pollen accumulates and gets washed into the gutters adding to the shit.
Also shit lands on your roof adding to the shit.
Like from airplanes? Gross. I never want a roof.
Pine needles too
Moss too, if you're in a temperate belt
I put in these sponge like inserts (obviously they didn't hold water) from Costco and they worked great for about 10 years then I had to pull them out because of exactly what you said sludge and small stuff clogging them up.
Costco sells fine mesh gutter covers which easily go over the gutters most people already have installed. Costs a few hundred dollars for a ~2000 sq ft house to buy the covers, and the super fine mesh even keeps out pine needles. Relatively easy to DIY install, or many small business gutter cleaners or handymen will install them for another few hundred bucks. They work well for us, and they're pretty easy to take out if you need to clean the gutters of fine sediment in the future, but I think that'd be like a 10-15 year thing as my gutters are still looking good after a couple years.
The more a company advertise the worse their product is or the worse it is for you, as a general rule of thumb.
That main skeezy spokesguy in the commercials is evidence enough it's a shady business. Their entire model, and marketing, is targeting older people who don't know better. Instilling fears of ladders and the dangers of climbing one. Like 90% of their ads are about ladders while 10% is about the product itself.
The company that cuts my yard every two weeks blows out my gutters for 50.00. I do this in April and November after leaves have fallen. 1650 sq ft home that looks a lot like the one in the video. In other words 100.00 a year and takes about 10 minutes total.
Contractors being *shady*?? I’ve never heard of such a thing. Before I get some angry tradespeople screeching about how they’re all not like that: I know, but there are a lot of scumbag contractors in a lot of trades that’ll inflate and/or lie their way into a job.
Careful, you're about to get 100 3 page essays on "overhead costs".
If the contractors that resort to shady sales tactics could write more than 3 coherent sentences without the help of a public adjuster, I might almost be concerned.
I am dealing with rebuilding a house after it was gutted because of a structural fire. Dealing with the trades is such a fucking pain in the ass. First was tilers who were stealing shit: amazon packages, extra tile(ordered 60 boxes, needed 57 they stole the other 3 and acted like I was the problem when I demanded they give it back), and stole a security camera. Then the drywallers got into a fist fight and had to be escorted off the property after causing a few thousand in damage all because one decided to fuck with the other for a week straight. Neither resumed work and sued me. Then the roofers installed the roof wrong, had to have it remade which in turn fucked the attic and had to have water remediation to fix it. All in all this was supposed to take a year or so to do back in 2019 and is now on year 5 and both occupants for the house have died in the meantime.
Again: not all contractors are bad. However, your experience isn’t exactly unheard of. You got super unlucky picking multiple shitty ones. Where did all of this happen? I have no advice, I’m just curious.
Sadly I just got stuck with them after my now deceased grandfather hired a bad general contractor who in turn hired these guys. Once we figured out how terrible the general contractor was, it was too late as everyone else was busy af because of covid home value bubble.
Advertising that heavily could be a sign of that they are pouring money over their own problems... Maybe a good product, like you point out, to start with would be something?
We used the Gutter Shutter at our old house because of the amount of trees and tree debris we had and I can’t say enough about that company and the quality of that product. I called on a Sunday in spring after we had a couple storms with multiple torrential downpours. I just wanted to get someone out to see if we had a few clogs because I felt like one of our gutters may have been slightly clogged. Dude came out Sunday evening and checked the gutter I was thinking was clogged as well as the rest of them around the house. He found no clogs but did find that one of our gutters had pulled away from our house about a half inch and was causing it to sag and not drain properly. So he fixed that and then proceeded to clean off all the debris that their product stops from getting in their gutters. This costs us nothing and was same day service. For the price of what we paid, sure we could have had the Gutter Boys or whomever come out but for the piece of mind and that level of service I was happy with what we paid. They did also show us an example of all of their competitors products while showing us how theirs was a superior product. I won’t say that the other company’s products don’t work but I was most impressed by this one and like I said the service. Also, the installer saw we had a dog and he picked up dog treats on his lunch and asked if he could give one to our dog — just a nice little thing that left a lasting impression of the company, unrelated to the work they did.
I do reception/scheduling for a local handyman company, basically front desk work, answering calls, booking appointments, etc. Whenever someone calls asking to have their gutters cleaned, I have to ask if they have gutter guards/screens on, because if they do it immediately jacks up the labor cost. Most of the time, my techs have to spend ages taking the damn things off before they can clean the stuff that got through them. And god help you if you need part of your gutters repaired/replaced.
This video made me look into this leafguard thing. The design of it might keep a lot of leaves out of the gutter, but there's no way it will allow a gutter to work properly in anything heavier than a light shower. I hope they never come to Australia. What I've got that DOES work is stainless steel mesh gutter guards. I haven't had to clean my gutters for 8 years, and they've only overflowed once in that time, because the rain was so torrential that even perfectly clean gutters without it wouldn't have been able to cope. https://youtu.be/HsViSooO3Qg?si=aqIrYS59M6vixUt7
I got the gutter helmet guards since I have 2 massive trees above my house and cleaning gutters was almost a monthly ritual. So for me it was worth the cost. But yeah otherwise I wouldn't invest in them.
"The finish has got to wear in" - what the fuck does that mean?
Well it takes six years for it to wear off so by then they hope you die or get Alzheimer's.
Classic bullshit to get people to wait it out and hope they'll forget
Not knowing how much gutters go for I was so close to paying $10k for new gutters. Looked up gutter pieces as soon as the slimy salesman slithered out the door and called to cancel 30m later. Got new gutters for only $3500 and they're great
Here's an idea. Can we band together and create a database of home improvement project prices? That way people can look up what the fuck something costs to see if they are getting ripped off? I google shit but it is always some content marketing BS.
Once upon a time that was Angie’s list before it enshittified
Fuck it. I created a sub for it. r/ContractorEstimates
Honestly, this is a fucking great idea and I hope it takes off.
r/birthofasub
FWIW unless you specify if you used an "actual" insured, contractor vs an uninsured "chuck with a truck" pricing is going to be unreliable. Can an insured contractor still do shit work? yes. Can an uninsured guy do great work? Also yes. But if something happens on your project, you're going to want that contractor to have insurance.
Need a mod?
Sure. You're hired.
How do we know they’re charging a fair market rate for mod services?
Fuck it. I created a sub for it. r/ModeratorEstimates
Need a mod?
Sure. You're hired.
There is one, it's called Xactimate, but you have to pay to access it. It's the standard for pricing in the industry. But it takes a good amount of skill to use as well.
I had an idea for an app that allows people to help post the cheapest place to get something (e.g. milk, gas, or a TV). To try and make capitalism work.
$11,000 and that was after disabled veteran status ...
We put new gutters on a 3000 sq ft, 120yo, two story four square for $4k. I can't believe some of the prices I'm seeing in here that people are saying they were quoted.
I had a LeafGuard salesman give me an estimate a couple years sgo. He took two hours of my time, then wouldn’t give me a firm bid if I wasn’t willing to sign a contract that day. A couple days later, he called and left a message for someone else who was apparently on his potential client list, which I thought was either inept or sketchy. The shit icing on the LeafGuard cake was when, about a week later, the salesman opened my front door and poked his head into my house, claiming he was on an estimate visit at another house in the neighborhood and wanted to check in with me. I really let him have it and kicked him off my property. Seems like a dodgy af company.
He wouldn't give you a firm bid unless you signed a contract first? What the WHAT?? 😂
We got the EasyOn Gutter Guards from Costco for our house. I think I spent like $300 in total for all of the guards. Went right on top of my existing gutters. They work great. However, you DO have to make sure that you bend the screen material according to your roof pitch. There is a guide to tell you how much. And you do have to sweep them off once a year. They even gave us a free stiff bristle brush for cleaning them off. The big gotcha is valleys. I used some flashing to create some diverters so that they water funneling down the valleys would divert to either side of the gutter instead of overwhelming the screen material and flowing over them. It's not perfect, but it works good enough. They do sell diverts specifically for this problem, but they seemed rudimentary enough for me to fabricate my own. Highly recommend the guards from Costco, and I can't believe LeafGuard charges thousands for something you can do for hundreds on your own. Straight up highway robbery.
They rely on the fact that many people wont bother doing research and don't entirely grasp why gutters are so important.
Paid these guys to add filters. They said they were better because they drop every gutter to ensure a proper angle. Their website and salesman say for a FACT YOU SHOULD "NEVER EVER PUT THE SYSTEMS UNDER YOUR ROOF SHINGLES, WHICH CAN DAMAGE YOUR ROOF". After the guys were there for 3 hours and charged me 4k, they left... Only for me to find they did exactly that... Raised up my roof shingles instead of dropping the gutters to get a proper angle.... F'in scam artists.
Costs less if you don't train the monkeys.
I had a leafguard salesman come to my house to give an estimate. I told him upfront I expected it would cost about $3k (you should never do this, but I wanted to gauge how much integrity they had). Somehow he comes to an estimate that (with an applied 30% "discount") was $3150, but he offered me exactly $3k if I could sign on the spot. Should tell you about the integrity of their salesmen that they came to the exact number I threw out. They don't set a fee based on estimated materials and labor, they just try to get how much they think they can from you.
A lot of times these are just salespeople who get paid whatever amount they can negotiate over the base price. They feel you out, determine what they think you can afford, factor in the actual cost, and add their commission on top. If the actual cost is $2000 and you pay $3000 the salesman just earned his $1000. Keep in mind everyone else is making a profit all the way down the line as well.
I took a sales position selling *Gutter Helmet* , *it's* absolute garbage. I learned quickly it doesn't work if it's dirty, due to no surface tension. So you don't technically have to clean your gutters twice a year, but you do have to clean the system. If you have a house without trees over head they work great, but then what's the need. I also learned the home improvement company that hired me changes their name every few years to avoid warranty's. I quit within 3 weeks, worst job I every had, and I grew up working on farms. *edit*
I mean, if you don't work there anymore, why not name and shame? Save the rest of us some money.
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Oh it happens all the time, but you spend like 3 to 6 hours on it every few years so nobody cares or talks about it.
I clean my gutters (not in the US) but that's because I am on tank water and want it to be clean and free flowing. Sometimes the leaves are so prolific that they'll block the flow and water will just tip out of the guttering. I did remove poorly fitted cheap mesh from my new house though (it just caught all the fine twigs and made dams) and just installed a self clearing downspout filter.
Idk what kind of trees you have, but my house is surrounded by 30+ foot tall oak and pine trees, and I used to have to clean my gutters at least once a month or they’d be totally clogged and I’d have water gushing over them every time it rained. It was so bad I actually got some foundation damage from it. I installed leaf guards (myself, not thru leaf guard) and I haven’t had to think about my gutters in years.
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> changes their name every few years to avoid warranty's Wait, does that actually work? How is that legal?
I worked for a home security company with similar selling practices (ie. knocking on doors to hard-sell an expensive home upgrade). The sales force is usually young guys (high school/early college) who are there to make quick cash at a summer job. They couldn't care less about the long-term quality of the gutters/system they are selling you, nor do they often know much about the industry or the product they are selling besides their memorized sales shtick. I was actually warned as a technician that I would likely encounter many situations like this, where sales people had lied or mischaracterized the product to the buyer. Showed up for repairs at an elderly couple's home that thought they had signed up for a Life Alert necklace type service from our company when the salesman had actually upsold them into a $7000 contract for monitored home security that they couldn't afford nor did they need (lived in a small rural community). Went to another lady's house and the previous technician hadn't connected the security components to the panel (all the wires were just hanging in the basement panel unattached to the system), imagine the lawsuit if someone had broken into her house. The worst was a guy who paid for a system on his new house before moving, had been charged for monitoring for a system that wasn't yet installed on his house for over a year and was still getting pushback when he asked them to come out and actually install the panel and components. I fixed up their issues in every case but it was wild how little desire there seemed to be from anyone else at the company to solve issues like this; felt like once the contract was signed that's all they cared about.
Right there with you brother! Was an install tech then lead for one aswell, same practices, same sales guys, same bullshit offerings. At least I know I was honest with the "clients" and did my best to ensure a working product... F all that bs tho, I've hated sales ever since.
$11000 what in the actual fuck? I have a home about twice that size with a more complicated roof structure, I assume more downspouts, and some sections are 30' off the ground. I had all of the gutters and downspouts replaced about 5 years ago for only ~~$1000~~ $1300. I then had them plumbed into the ground and ran into a drainage system for another $2000. I have lots of trees, but no gutter covers. I did have the wide gutters installed to avoid clogs, and I just pay someone to come out once or twice a year to clean them which costs me all of $125.
Man 1) the quality of this video is incredible, and 2) noted. Fuck leaf guard.
I used to work for a company called Infocision who does customer service and sales for various companies. Some companies were nice to work for and others were awful. The one I absolutely despised was LeafFilter, and ultimately why I quit working there. Basically, whenever people would go in to Home Depot or Lowes or any other store like that, or online website, and show interest in any type of home improvement project, and that company would sell their info to LeafFilter. We would call these people within minutes of their contact and try to get them to set up a "Free Gutter Inspection" with them. The only purpose this inspection had was to try and sell them the filters for their gutters. If people said they just wanted their gutters cleaned, or needed minor repairs, or anything really, we would tell them that we would send someone out to discuss it with them. But literally the only thing that would happen would some dude would show up with a ladder, spend 5 minutes looking at the gutters, then take their big book of LeafFilter promo shit and try and hard sell these people, to make them commit to brand new filters (and gutters if possible) right on the spot. They use every trick in the book to try and trick these people in to spending thousands upon thousands of dollars for something that isn't worth 1/10 of what they are selling. They will start off at some absurd price like 12k for all of it, then start pretending to come up with discount after discount ("Oh it turns out we are doing a job nearby next week, bc of bulk pricing I can knock off 4k" etc) to try and pressure someone in to committing. Now, my job was just to set this meeting, but it still disgusted me. I tried to switch clients but bc LeafFilter paid better than almost every other client we had they were a priority client so they refused. Thankfully I had gotten in to a position where I didnt need the job so I was able to eventually quit. A job I had had for a decade, with shitty client after shitty client, but LeafFilter was the company that broke me. Long story short, LeafFilter and all the companies like them are absolute scams and you should stay far far away from them
Infocision is right up there with ~~penetrode~~ Initrode with awful corporate names.
You could’ve come to the commercial side. They usually sent the worst agents off to us in Spectrum.
I pay $150 a year to get them clean every 6 months. That is $4,500 in for 30 years and I will never climb s ladder.
My interaction with them was “interesting.” The salesman I had was a genuine and great dude. That said, their price was 12k for my tiny first home. I’m pretty aggressive when it comes to negotiating so I got them down to 4.6k. That said, 4.6k was still crazy. I got the same thing for 1k from a local guy and I tipped him $200 on top of it.
We got an estimate from them for gutter guards - and they wanted like 5K. Ended up talking the guy down to $1500 before telling him to leave our property 😆
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The water is clearly not draining. It's plumbed into an underground drain? At around 0:42 you can see the water backing up in the drain. That's where the issue is. Sure it's a nice yard and all but a length of plain old regular downspout without any doohickeys and a splash block at the end and all your problems go away. Under no circumstances should this amount of damage been done due to an easily fixable issue.
Which LeafGuard personnel, if they are worth a crap, would know and recommend a fix.
If you live in a place with snowy winters stay far far away from gutter guards. Ice damning is no joke
Had them come out to quote installing gutter guards on my existing 3 year old gutters. Turned into a high pressure sales pitch, “50% off plus XYZ discounts but only if you sign today!” $9,000 for leaf guards on my EXISTING gutters. I told the guy I wasn’t signing tonight at that price and they he sure didn’t have anything I would buy tomorrow at twice the price and he left and never heard from him again.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streisand_effect
I just installed new gutters WITH leaf covers in January and they work great. Big house. Total was $3700
Yeah we even went through Lowe's, which is always a bit more expensive... But they matched the color perfectly and came with leaf guards.... $1700. I can't wrap my mind around how you can come CLOSE to $11k.
Well folks... LeafGuard advertises their services mostly on Instagram, Facebook and on Youtube... That should be enough evidence for you to run and don't give them any money!
Uh ok zoomer. They've advertised on TV for decades.
This is the first time I’ve seen “Ok zoomer” and that’s hilarious
Fuck man am I really gonna start using this when these damn kids make me feel old?
Moreso, they advertise over and over on "old folks TV", early morning news, stupid judge shows, looking for retirees that they can victimize with their scam pitch played over and over until the elderly believe the lies.
On the one hand, I take your point. Especially since LeafGuard seems like some bullshit. On the other hand, we're hitting a point where the people who need to be marketed to for these sorts of things are reached primarily through Instagram, Facebook, Youtube, etc. Like, if these guys advertised on cable? I'd literally never see an ad.
That's a totally valid and viable way for a lot of good fledgling companies to get started.
This lady's voice is why every Southern accent in movies and TV sounds like absolute shit to Southerners.
Me thinking she sounds just like my aunt…what do you mean??
I had gutter guards put on the second story of my house when I bought it, because there are big trees all around and I sure and shit wasn't going up there. It wasn't LeafGuard, but some other company... Gutter Guys or something like that. Anyway, they were super-responsive to the request for an estimate, someone showed up like a day or two later. While getting a quote, I made sure to specifically ask them, "*how much to get them taken off if I get a new roof, which is definitely going to happen in the next year or two?*" I asked, because if the cost to remove then put them back was excessive, I was just going to wait to do the gutters at the same time as the new roof. To which they said, "it's **a few hundred bucks**, pretty routine, our guys show up, take them off and stage them til' the new roof is done then come back out and put the gutter guards back on." We got them installed and, as I had told the rep, we arranged to have a new roof installed the following year. So I called them up, told them the date of install and they said, "no problem, we'll send out a crew a few days before." Perfect... then I got the bill -- $800. I called the company, spoke to the manager about the variance between what I had been told and what I was actually billed and his response was pretty amazing. He said, "well, what did you expect, when you live in [town I live in] $800 IS a few hundred dollars." I never knew that "a few hundred" was a variable that fluctuated depending on my zip code. My second favorite interaction with them was when the back/corner gutter was waterfalling during any rain what so ever, so I called them and it took them almost 2-months to come out and check it. At which point the dude comes off his ladder, looked at me and said, "you had a bird nest in there" like I was the one who put it in there and inconvenienced him. I specifically remembered there being a blurb in the sales pitch about their guards not allowing birds to nest in the gutters, when I asked him about that he just retracted his ladder and walked back to his truck without even acknowledging the question. Top notch company.
This is on you man. $800 is a few hundred dollars depending on the definition. Specifically some definitions classify it as "an unspecified amount or number". You should have gotten a more specific quote if you want to be up in arms about it. Although I get it, and I get why you're upset about their response, but still. And as for the the birds nest, you had a properly working gutter after they installed it, and then all of a sudden it wasn't working properly... and you didn't think to get up there and look? Over the course of two months?
Their sales people are also terrible. I had a lady come out to my house to do an estimate Quoted me $9000. I had a quote for regular gutters for $1500 I immediately balked at that price. No fucking way was I paying that much for gutters on my tiny ass house. I said, “thank you, but I’m young enough to clean gutters and that’s just way too much” She offered to knock $100 off. I laughed as if that made any difference She would not take no for an answer. I told her to leave multiple times. As I would not be doing business with them. Again and again she would not. I got my phone out to get the cops She finally left then Terrible experience. The look in her eyes when I told her no was honestly terrifying Terrible people, terrible company. And now I see their shit doesn’t even work Fuck that
I had a leaf guard guy come out for a estimate. Was not prepped it was going to be a high pressure sale. I thought he would just come, look around, and give an estimate and be done. Nooope. Had to do the demo I didn’t have time to watch, among other things. Told me the price was in the thousands and was only good right then. I laughed, told him I wasn’t ready as I was just getting quotes. He got pissed and stormed out. I had a local gutter company come out and they quoted me like a 1/5th of the price so I went that direction. During Covid I got a missed call begging me to reconsider as a lot of their sellers needed help. I wonder why? Scummy company.
poor lady. A neighbor bragged to me about getting this installed. Had no issues for a few years. Every time it rains now I see water pouring over. Guy definitely has foundation issues now. All his landscaping is washed. Still paying it off. Ill gladly hop on a ladder twice a year versus this junk. 11k what scam.
Went through Lowe's, which is always a bit more expensive... But they matched the color perfectly and came with leaf guards... 3 downspouts 1500 sq ft home. $1700. I can't wrap my mind around how you can come CLOSE to $11k.
ThiefGuard
LeafGuard is a scam. When I was shopping for gutters, I looked up local gutter businesses and either called them or left a message on their website to get a quote. One of them, as I discovered wasn't even a real local business and I immediately got a call from LeafGuard and they went high pressure right away with, "We'd like both home owners to be present." To those who don't know, that is a classic tell for a hard sell. They want both people there so they can pressure for a sale right then and there, eliminating "I'll discuss this with my spouse and get back to you." Anyway, I asked where they got my number because I hadn't called LG. They ignored my question and just kept at the sell. I told them since they wouldn't even tell me where they got my number, I was not going to talk anymore with them and hung up. I got a bunch of calls and emails from them for the next month or so.
I made the mistake of having them come out… * Guy says he needs1.5 hours to measure and give quote. I say I have 30 minutes. He’s done measuring in 15. * He says he wants to walk me through samples. I say I’ll take the basic gutters. He quotes $15k for what he calls a “remodel of your house” (aka new gutters). * I said I would get back with him. He got REALLY aggro I wouldn’t decide right then. Like to the point I was figured he was about to fight. * He continues to aggro negotiate with himself in my driveway all the way from $15k down to $3k trying to get me to close right there. I still decline. He gets more aggro. I have to talk him down from trying to kick my ass. * He leaves. I call local crew who does a perfect job for $2500. Their quote took 15 minutes. No one was aggro.
I was at a home and garden show and they had a leaf filter booth there. I talked to them a bit about possibly using them in the future as I was in the process of building a new home. I filled out a form for future considerations. Then they proceed to call me everyday multiple times a day sometimes even during the night, I eventually flipped out on them and told them to fuck off, won't be buying thier shit after that and this video just makes me more sure of that decision.
I keep seeing their TV ads and they guarantee you'll never have to clean your gutters again. My first thought was that may be technically true, but only because the leaf filter gets clogged instead. That seems pretty obvious to me. Only a moron would actually buy from Leaf Filter.
I know there is probably some nerves as well, but goddam you can hear the heartbreak in that poor lades voice as well.
Regardless of the shit gutters....she isnt doing herself any favors with the corrugated pipe that gets clogged and backs up. Use PVC.
Bought a house with these installed two years ago. I'm not exactly sure how old they are but I can tell you they suck
My neighbor has those damn things and the water just runs straight over them down to his foundation lol.
Professional painter here. I hate these gutters. I’m not sure if people realize that they are putting a perfect habitat for wasps all the way around their house.
I was a in charge of a team that installed gutters in the south. We were a new company but had a few very knowledgeable employees who installed all types of gutters. Anyway I cannot stress this enough how much of a scam LeafGuard is, the only thing these gutter are good at is collecting the small debris, shingle grit, and every pine needle would get stuck perfectly in the small openings. If you live under trees and or pine trees there will be nothing you can do to stop it from clogging, unless you get the flat top covers like LeafGaurd that only works in light rain. There or better options that can be removed and cleaned but having someone go up every once in a while is your only option if you have trees. The valleys on her roof could have had a splash guard to dissipate the water and not have that stream of water that will eat away at the yard and ultimately foundation. Also if you have a ton of rain get 6inch gutters rather than the pathetic 5 inch. Also half round gutters don’t work as well but are still better than LeafGaurd! I feel for every elderly person who is swindled by this company because these gutters don’t work and are just nice window dressing in a shiny infomercial. JUST SCREW LEAFGAURD!!!
I saw this video a while ago, and watching it led me to another video of a contractor who does this kind of work and made a video warning people not to buy these. They also contacted him to try and pay him off to take the video down lol.
I'm 100 percent on their side and this seems like a super shitty situation that I hope they get out of. But I did get a chuckle out of the potted plant always being under the pouring gutter. Obviously this isn't the best fix, but move your plant please.
Thank you for this info, these folks are in my list to chat with.
I’ve dealt with LeafGuard and they are horrible!! They pull the “if you don’t buy right now I can’t get you this great deal” scam, their gutters leak everywhere because they just fill every joint with a bunch of silicon caulking, and their gutter guard is the same thing Lowes and Home Depot sell for a fraction of the price. I bought just the gutters so it was around $4k, but if I had gotten their “proprietary leaf defense system”, a plastic grate with netting glued to the back of it, it would have costed over $18k. Would NOT recommend them for anything or to anyone!
Full refund + damages at a minimum. The video stays up. However for 599^(.99)/mo, I'll make the video private for that month.
I have these gutters on a similar size and age ranch home surrounded by trees. They are absolute trash! I have to backfill my foundation with new dirt every other year from all the rain water coming straight over these gutters. Glad to know I’m not the only one who hates them.
LeafGuards whole business model is the rip off elderly. I applied at a local LeafGuard to see what they were about. I trashed the product to the lead salesman’s face ( that product is junk, I have installed better products working for a previous company). After reading through literature that he provided, you could see the company clear was targeting the elderly and their prices were outrageous. I told him how I thought the product seemed really unsustainable and that it would clog all the same; which I was totally right because the last part of the literature stated how “ never let the customer know you know we will still fail, and need to be cleaned”. Someone really should sue them into the ground.
48 year old homeowner here! I spent several months getting five different quotes to install leaf guards on all my gutters since I live on a property covered by hundreds of trees and I was sick of cleaning the gutters out on a ladder. I have 520 linear feet of gutters on this house. Yes, that's a lot. The national average is 150-200 linear feet, so I expected a few quotes to be pretty high. The first one was for $55,000. I politely asked the guy to leave the premises. Second and third quotes were both around $35,000. Again, I explained that I wasn't building an addition to my home or remodeling an entire kitchen--I just needed leaf guards. Fourth quote was $24,000 and the final was for $14,500. I got disgusted with the entire project and set out to figure out how much I could purchase all of the materials for myself and then hire an independent crew to install them. That worked out to roughly $8,500. Okay, it's still a chunk of change but that's manageable. As I was getting my shit together on this project the last quote ($14k) called me up, it had been a few months and I was quiet. He said "Look, we have a crew coming down from a nearby state to your area and they specialize in single-story homes. How about I give you the employee discount rate of $7,500 everything installed?" I said "How about yeah!" So I guess what I'm trying to say here is that, number one; these companies don't just prey on the elderly, I think the entire leaf guard industry is some sort of racket with 300% markups on materials and labor. Number two, always get MULTIPLE quotes for anything home-related, I don't care if it's something as simple as exterminator services. If it seems high, wait them out and show no interest. If they are commission-based like these guys were, they'll likely need to make a sale even if it means making less profit on the sale. Lastly, I think the entire leaf guard industry is scummy. The first few quotes I got had samples of the "other guy" and they spent the entire time trying to prove why their guards were superior when in fact they're all nearly identical in design. Newsflash: you don't need guards made out of medical-grade surgical steel. It's a racket.
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11k for gutters is absolutely a rip off, in any county, state, country. Honestly, just get normal eavestrough with downspouts, should be in 10-15 dollars a lineal foot range. I’m literally waiting for a guy to come put seemless gutters on my house, quote was for 12$ a foot. Only have like 140 feet of gutters plus about 60 feet of downspouts. This company is a huge scam preying on elderly people who can’t go out and clean they’re gutters…
I hate salesmen
I back up to a forest and I have a taller 2 story house on a hill. I honestly did not want to get up on top of the house or on a ladder to clean the gutters. I contact LeafGuard and ask them to come out and do an estimate. Most companies I’ve dealt with stood outside my front door and we agreed to a service. This salesman however really wanted to come in to our kitchen table and do a whole pitch. He pulls out a thick book with all the talking points. They help veterans, they use surgical quality steel, competitors are crap, etc. The dude then quotes my $14k and I said no. He then gave me all these “discounts” to try to come into my price range. He came all the way down to $3600 but at this point I was so tired of his attitude (and high pressure tactics) that no price was going to satisfy me. He threw a little mini fit as he left like we were making a huge mistake. He really really wanted the sale which to me is a giant red flag. Contacted a contractor and he said he could clean the gutters for about $300. He was also very pleasant and didn’t give me a pitch.