Real estate professionals: What makes you trust your vendors to do right by your homeowners? You need more than their word, or even an established history. This is why America’s Preferred Home Warranty (APHW) proudly displays our TrustDALE Certification right on our homepage — the only home warranty company they approve.
Who — and what — is TrustDALE?
With over 35 years in investigative journalism, Dale Cardwell is well-known for going after corruption. “He’s responsible for sending several people to prison, has been under security watch, and has even been shot at,” shared TrustDALE.com General Manager Laura Lovejoy. “He basically got on the news every night talking about rotten things going on in the world, all because he wanted to help people before problems came around.”
Dale realized that the best way to proactively protect consumers was to identify the safest companies to work with. So he used his years of experience to develop a certification process, a standard by which one can know a company is not only legitimate, but backed by the TrustDALE $10,000 Make it Right Guarantee™.
“Dale has the highest integrity with a heart for consumers,” Laura said. “And we are 100 percent dedicated to doing the right thing.”
What does a TrustDALE Certification require?
“Every company that wants to be part of the network goes through Dale’s 7-point investigative process,” Laura shared, noting that it requires background checks, court records reviews, and more. “It’s amazing some of the people who try to apply — they don’t think we’ll find what we’re able to find, and not a single company becomes part of our network without Dale’s research and approval.”
At present, APHW is the only home warranty company to receive a TrustDALE certification. “APHW actually helps consumers with their problems,” Laura shared. “They are a business that operates ethically and tries to do right by the consumer, and there aren’t many of those in the home warranty field.”
Here is the 7-Point Review Process, direct from TrustDALE.com:
- Price: The Company must honor the price it advertises, and not use unavailable products to lure and trap customers into more expensive products. Review can be accomplished by a combination of e-mail, phone, and secret shoppers.
- Verified: The performance of each company is continually and systematically reviewed for delivery of excellent customer service.
- What Would Dale Do? Dale Cardwell developed a proven standard of consumer fairness through thousands of real-world problem-solving experiences. Inclusion means Dale would choose to personally do business with this company.
- Consumer Experience: The TrustDALE team reviews well-known as well as more specialized databases to determine patterns of customer satisfaction.
- Licensing, Professional Certification, Insurance and/or Bonding: Each Company is reviewed for proper professional credentialing.
- Lawsuit Search and Review: A review of the Company’s litigation history is requested and reviewed to assure no patterns of unprofessional or illegal business practices.
- $10,000 Make it Right Guarantee™: The Company agrees to accept and abide by TrustDALE’s $10,000 Make it Right Guarantee™.
What is the Guarantee?
When homeowners sign a contract with a TrustDALE Certified company and something goes wrong, TrustDALE’s $10,000 Make it Right Guarantee™ gives them a true third-party, real-live human being right here in the U.S. who can answer their calls and work to make things right, all at no cost to them.
“The last thing an agent wants is to offer a home warranty to someone, have it be no good, and then their homeowner doesn’t have anyone to go to,” Laura shared. “APHW is such an excellent product that I’m confident you’ll never have an issue. But just in case, any real estate agent can recommend APHW with that added level of confidence that if a homeowner does have an issue, there’s a third party they can go to: TrustDALE.”
What do your homeowners need to know?
The most important step is to ensure your homeowners register their APHW home warranty purchase at TrustDALE.com within 48 hours of signing the contract. “This is what qualifies them for the Make it Right Guarantee and access to TrustDALE and third-party assistance if they need it, and it takes about seven seconds to register the purchase. It’s super simple,” Laura said.
APHW offers layers of trust
Dale is here for the consumer, and so is APHW — so much so that we’ve signed the $10,000 Make it Right Guarantee™ pledge, allowing TrustDALE to dictate how we’ll make it right if we don’t honor our contract. “It says a lot about a company that’s willing to allow a third party to mediate on your behalf,” Laura said.
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