It's natural to assume a one-star review is about the work. A roof that still leaks, a fence that leans, a furnace that won't light. So we checked. On October 17, 2026 we pulled the Google reviews of 1,042 trades businesses in Vernon, Kelowna, West Kelowna and Penticton, 4,612 reviews in all, and read every 1- and 2-star review in the set.
The work was the complaint in only 55 of the 184 bad reviews that had any text. That's 3 in 10. The rest were about the bill, the callback that never came, the mess, the quote that never showed up and the company truck that cut someone off. Those are things you control before anyone picks up a tool.
The Short Answer: Most Bad Reviews Are About How the Job Was Handled
Here's what the 184 bad reviews with text complained about. A review can count in more than one row, so the rows add up to more than 184.
| What the 1- or 2-star review was about | Reviews | Share of 184 |
|---|---|---|
| The work itself (didn't fix it, poor install) | 55 | 29.9% |
| The bill (over the quote, surprise charges) | 31 | 16.8% |
| Wouldn't come back to fix it or honour a warranty | 27 | 14.7% |
| Not a customer (driving, trucks, job sites, door knocking) | 25 | 13.6% |
| Rude or dismissive staff | 24 | 13.0% |
| Never called back, never sent the quote, never showed | 22 | 12.0% |
| Damage or mess at the house | 21 | 11.4% |
| Communication during the job | 17 | 9.2% |
| Took far longer than promised | 16 | 8.7% |
| A store counter or product, not a service job | 10 | 5.4% |
| Too vague to tell, or something else | 13 | 7.1% |
Three things stand out. A quarter of the bad reviews weren't about a job at all. Among the ones from paying customers, more than half never mention the work. And a bad review that makes it into a business's first five tends to stay there for years.
How We Did This, and What It Can't Tell You
We used Google's Places API to search 16 trades in four towns: roofing, plumbing, electrical, heating and air conditioning, landscaping, general contractors, painting, flooring, concrete, gutters, tree service, fencing, windows, garage doors, pest control and excavating. Each search ran two ways, once typed with the town name (“plumber Kelowna BC”) and once as the trade alone, centred on the town. That's 128 searches and 1,064 different businesses. We dropped 22 big-box stores and unrelated businesses and kept 1,042. Of those, 1,006 had at least one review.
For each business, the API returns up to five reviews, which Google's own documentation says are “sorted by relevance”. That gave us 4,612 reviews. 193 were 1 or 2 stars. We read all of them and tagged what each one complained about. The 5-star reviews we counted by keyword, then read samples to check the counts.
Know the limits before you read the results:
- It's Google's top five, not every review. Google Maps also opens a profile's reviews on “Most relevant,” but we haven't proven the two lists match on every phone.
- One afternoon, one set of searches. The top 20 results per search, not every business in the valley.
- One reader, fixed rules. A review could get more than one tag. Long reviews were read in full.
- We can't see owner replies. The API doesn't return them, so we can't tell you who answered and who didn't.
- Some neighbours got in. “Window installation” pulls in auto glass shops and “landscaping” pulls in soil yards. We kept them, because a homeowner searching sees them too.
- We're not naming anyone. No business or staff names. The quotes below are short and name-free.
1 in 4 Bad Reviews Weren't About a Job at All
47 of the 184 bad reviews (25.5 percent) weren't about any job the business did for the reviewer. They split into two groups.
22 tried to hire the business and got nothing back. No callback, no quote after the site visit, nobody at the appointment they booked. Some had already met someone from the company. A crew member came out, measured, promised a number, and then went quiet. “Three weeks later and I have still not received the quote,” one wrote. The rest never got past the phone. Voicemails not returned, website requests not answered, an emergency line nobody picked up. One of these reviews ends with a line every owner should read twice: “I don’t feel like I need to chase after contractors to give them my money.”
A quote you decide not to send is still an answer the customer is waiting for. A two-line text that says “we're booked until spring, here's who we'd call” costs you nothing. Silence costs you a review that can sit on your profile for years.
25 weren't customers at all, and 12 of those were about how a company vehicle was driven. Speeding through a school zone. Cutting people off. Rocks and dirt coming off a truck. “Not great advertising when you drive so poorly,” one says. Concrete and excavating companies got 15 of the 25. That makes sense: big trucks with the name on the door, on the road all day.
If you've wrapped your trucks (we priced what a truck wrap is worth in a separate post), this is the other side of it. The logo that gets you noticed also tells every annoyed driver exactly where to leave the review. Google's policy says a review should reflect “an actual experience with a business”. Whether being cut off by your truck counts is Google's call, not yours. Plan as if it stays.
From Paying Customers, the Bill and the Callback Hurt as Much as the Work
Take out the non-customers, the people who never got a quote, the store-counter complaints and the reviews too vague to read. That leaves 114 bad reviews from people who paid for a service job. Here's what they complained about:
| Complaint | Reviews | Share of 114 |
|---|---|---|
| The work itself | 54 | 47.4% |
| The bill (over the quote, surprise charges, deposits) | 30 | 26.3% |
| Wouldn't come back, fix it or honour the warranty | 27 | 23.7% |
| Damage or mess at the house | 18 | 15.8% |
| Communication during the job | 17 | 14.9% |
| Rude or dismissive | 16 | 14.0% |
| Took far longer than promised | 15 | 13.2% |
The work is still the biggest single complaint. But 60 of the 114 (52.6 percent) never mention the work at all, and only 15 are about the work and nothing else. When the work is the complaint, something else usually went wrong too. In 39 of those 54 reviews, the company also stopped answering, sent a bigger bill, left a mess or ran late.
The bill complaints have a pattern. 21 of the 30 aren't saying the price was too high. They're saying it wasn't what they were told. An estimate with one number and an invoice with another. A “free estimate” that needed a paid visit first. Hours billed that the homeowner had watched and timed. Extra charges that showed up after the contract was signed.
The callback complaints sting the most, because the business already had the customer's money. “Once the balance was paid we cannot get them back to finish the job.” Flooring that buckled, gutters that leaked, a heat pump still under warranty, and the company stopped picking up the phone. Several of these reviewers say they called again and again before they wrote anything.
What do your first five say? Book a free 20-minute call. We'll pull your Google reviews the same way we did for this study, show you what a homeowner sees first, and tell you which ones we'd reply to.
Book a Free Review Check →More Reviews Won't Bury a Bad One
153 of the 1,006 businesses (15.2 percent) had at least one 1- or 2-star review among the reviews Google returned first. You'd expect a business with hundreds of reviews to push the bad ones out of sight. That's not what we found.
| Total Google reviews | Businesses | Bad review in the first five | Share |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 to 4 | 163 | 24 | 14.7% |
| 5 to 9 | 136 | 25 | 18.4% |
| 10 to 49 | 460 | 64 | 13.9% |
| 50 to 199 | 191 | 31 | 16.2% |
| 200 or more | 56 | 9 | 16.1% |
A business with 200 or more reviews was about as likely to show a bad one up front as a business with 10 to 49. We can't see how Google decides what's relevant. What we can see is that the bad reviews in the first five are long and detailed. The median 1-star review in our set ran 75.5 words. The median 5-star review ran 53.
They're also old. The median bad review in a first five was 492 days old, about 16 months. 58 of the 193 were more than three years old, and a few describe things that happened in 2017. Homeowners reading those profiles today still see them near the top.
What a 4.6 Looks Like to a Homeowner
The lower the star average, the more often a homeowner's first look includes a bad review. Here's the split:
| Google rating | Businesses | Bad review in the first five | Share |
|---|---|---|---|
| 4.8 to 5.0 | 760 | 25 | 3.3% |
| 4.5 to 4.7 | 127 | 38 | 29.9% |
| 4.0 to 4.4 | 80 | 53 | 66.2% |
| Under 4.0 | 39 | 37 | 94.9% |
A 4.6 sounds close to perfect. But 760 of the 1,006 trades businesses in our searches (75.5 percent) sit at 4.8 or higher, so in the Okanagan a 4.6 trails three out of four of the businesses in our searches. And about 3 in 10 profiles in the 4.5 to 4.7 range show a bad review in the first five. If you want the review-count side of this, we covered how many Google reviews you need in Vernon or Kelowna in an earlier study.
Which Okanagan Trades Show a Bad Review First
Each business counts once, under the trade it showed up for most.
| Trade | Businesses | Bad review in the first five | Share |
|---|---|---|---|
| Pest control | 39 | 16 | 41.0% |
| Flooring | 50 | 14 | 28.0% |
| Fencing | 45 | 10 | 22.2% |
| Windows and doors | 54 | 12 | 22.2% |
| Heating and air conditioning | 60 | 12 | 20.0% |
| Concrete | 59 | 11 | 18.6% |
| Tree service | 54 | 10 | 18.5% |
| Excavating | 80 | 13 | 16.2% |
| Roofing | 69 | 11 | 15.9% |
| Garage doors | 32 | 5 | 15.6% |
| Landscaping | 83 | 11 | 13.3% |
| Plumbing | 80 | 10 | 12.5% |
| Gutters | 44 | 5 | 11.4% |
| Electrical | 84 | 5 | 6.0% |
| General contractors | 89 | 5 | 5.6% |
| Painting | 84 | 3 | 3.6% |
The groups are small, from 32 to 89 businesses each, so read the order loosely. Painting, general contractors and electrical showed the fewest. Pest control and flooring showed the most. By town, Vernon (12.7 percent) and Kelowna (12.9 percent) came in lower than West Kelowna (19.2 percent) and Penticton (18.8 percent). We don't have a good explanation for the town split, and with groups this size it may not hold up on another day.
What the 5-Star Reviews Say Instead
The good reviews read like the bad ones turned inside out. We counted how often 4,221 5-star reviews used certain words, then read a dozen random matches for each one to make sure the count meant what we thought.
| What the 5-star review mentions | Reviews | Share of 5-star reviews |
|---|---|---|
| Recommends the business | 2,392 | 56.7% |
| Professional | 1,517 | 35.9% |
| Quality or attention to detail | 1,119 | 26.5% |
| Quick, prompt, same day or next day | 995 | 23.6% |
| Friendly, kind or polite | 881 | 20.9% |
| Fair or reasonable price | 840 | 19.9% |
| On time | 660 | 15.6% |
| Communication or updates | 657 | 15.6% |
| Honest or transparent | 406 | 9.6% |
| Cleaned up | 405 | 9.6% |
| Explained the work | 236 | 5.6% |
Keyword counts are a floor. Plenty of reviews praise the same thing in other words. And one thing a keyword count can't catch is names. In a random sample of 100 five-star reviews, 63 named the person who did the work. Homeowners remember the tech, the estimator and the person on the phone. One review starts: “I called early in the morning and to my surprise a human answered and not voice mail.”
Line the two lists up. On time against the no-show. A fair price against the surprise bill. Cleaned up against the mess. Kept us informed against the voicemail nobody returned. Quality shows up in about a quarter of the 5-star reviews. Almost everything else on the list is about how the job was run, from the first phone call to the last invoice.
What to Change Before Your Next Bad Review
- Answer every inquiry, even with a no. 22 of the bad reviews came from people who never got a callback, a quote or the visit they booked. “We're booked until March” or “that job's too small for us” costs you one text.
- Put the quote in writing, and send a change order before the bill changes. 21 of the bad reviews from paying customers were about a bill that didn't match what they were told. A text that says “we found rot, it's $800 more, OK to go ahead?” turns a surprise into a decision the customer made.
- Have a callback rule for finished jobs. 27 reviews came from customers who couldn't get the company back. Decide who answers warranty calls and how fast, and tell the customer at handoff.
- Make clean-up part of the job. 18 paying customers wrote about damage or mess. Walk the site with the customer before you leave.
- Talk to your drivers. If your name is on the truck, every lane change is public. 12 of the bad reviews we read were about driving.
Then ask for reviews from the jobs that went well, and ask the customer to mention who did the work. It helps the next homeowner, and your crew will like seeing their names.
Reply to the bad reviews already on your profile, old ones included. Google's help page says that when you reply to reviews, you show customers you value their feedback. Keep it short and calm, don't argue the details, and say what you changed. A reply doesn't remove the review, but the next homeowner reads both.
If you'd rather not handle this yourself, review replies are part of our local SEO service and our Google Business Profile management for trades in Vernon and Kelowna. Either way, start with the five reviews Google shows first. That's what a homeowner reads before they call you.
How we did this: On October 17, 2026 we ran 128 Google Places API text searches (16 trades, four Okanagan towns, two query styles) with service-area businesses included, and kept up to five reviews per business in Google's relevance order. 1,042 businesses after removing 22 big-box and unrelated listings, 4,612 reviews. Every 1- and 2-star review was read and tagged by hand. 5-star themes are keyword counts, with 12 random matches per theme read to check them. The name count is a hand-read random sample of 100 five-star reviews.