American Home Shield Reviews and Complaints

The contractors who are willing to work for ANY home warranty companies (not just AHS) have poor reviews, ratings and consumer complaints because of the lack of home warranty pay. They have no option but to service high volumes of low paying service calls.

They are not paid by the home warranty much (if any) more than the customer’s co-pay, regardless of the problem or the actual costs of parts/labor/etc. For example, the furnace repair company will charge AHS the same $200 whether there is no furnace failure found, the failure is found not to be a covered repair, or the furnace has to be repaired or replaced. There is no incentive for the AHS contractor to do anything more than show up at your house to bill AHS the $200. Home warranty companies like AHS look at each contractor in their limited network to track the statistics—most important of which is their average cost per claim being charged.

All that matters to AHS is that the contractor is keeping the average cost per call at the $200 target for HVAC claims. The complaints, of course, made my the customers, have no impact on AHS. What reputable service company would work under those constraints? What happens to the reputation of a contractor who starts taking on AHS customers?

What happens to the average cost per call of an AHS contractor doing what’s necessary to make you itchy AHS customers happy? What happens when the AHS contractor’s costs are above the $200 average per call?

And why would AHS only have such a small, scattered network of contractors? You can figure it out.

There are so many complaints regarding this exact scenario. The contractors working for home warranty companies are not allowed to charge AHS more than an average amount of about $150 per work order, regardless of the amount of work or equipment costs that are needed.

So the costs of the job are going to get passed on to the consumers, unless AHS makes the contractor absorb them.

In the case of water heaters, they get you on the “modifications” and “upgrades” needed to install the new water heater. It’s best to avoid using a home warranty, and just hire local professionals when needed.

I can shed some light as to why this happened, from inside knowledge as a contractor. AHS compiles work order cost statistics on each contractor.

They average the cost per claim, regardless of what was repaired. Even large cost tickets are factored in to the contractors “average ticket cost”. The simple truth is that ALL of the AHS work will be assigned to the “preferred AHS” contractor who is running the lowest average cost per work order; regardless of how they do it. The savvy contractor learns to cut corners, absorb most of the cost, and find a way to save AHS money through denials and costs passed on to customers.

The result is that they keep their overhead extremely low, but handle way too many work orders to schedule the customers in a timely manner. On the initial service call, don’t expect a repair or fix, unless it’s a quick fix like a capacitor that happens to be on the technician’s truck.

Otherwise, be prepared to wait for a lengthy claims submission process, parts ordering, and really long wait times for actual repair return visits. Your plan pays for their resolution, not yours.