What CaseTrust Actually Asks of You

The three requirements that have teeth

CaseTrust is the Consumers Association of Singapore accreditation scheme, and for renovation businesses the substantive conditions are these.

• —Use the CaseTrust Standard Renovation Contract rather than your own document
• —Protect consumer prepayments with a deposit performance bond, at no cost to the homeowner
• —Hold a documented procedure for handling variation orders

The bond is the real cost, and the real product

The deposit performance bond protects a client prepayment against your firm closing, being wound up or going into liquidation before their renovation is finished. It is the one thing on the list that costs you money rather than effort.

It is also the thing worth selling. A homeowner deciding between five firms is being told by every guide they read to worry about exactly that scenario, and you are the only one in the comparison with an answer to it that is not a reassurance.

The documented variation procedure is paperwork you already need

Requiring a written procedure for variations sounds like an administrative hoop. In practice it is the discipline that decides whether changes on a job get paid for, and firms lose more margin to undocumented variations than accreditation costs.

If you already issue a written variation with the change, the cost impact, the effect on the programme and both signatures before the work starts, you have the procedure. If you do not, that is worth fixing whether or not you ever apply. The variation order guide sets out what one has to contain.

The standard contract is the trade-off

Using a prescribed contract means giving up terms you wrote yourself. For most residential firms that is a smaller loss than it sounds, because the quotation was carrying the terms and often carrying them thinly.

It is a genuine consideration for firms doing anything unusual, and it is the question worth answering first: read the standard contract, and decide whether the terms you would lose are terms you were actually relying on.

What it does for the comparison

A homeowner on an aggregator platform is comparing five to eight firms at once and cannot assess any of their work. Accreditation is one of the very few signals available that is not self-reported: it can be checked on a register rather than taken on trust from a logo on a website.

That is worth more in this market than in most, because the thing clients are most afraid of here is not bad workmanship. It is paying money to a firm that disappears.

It does not replace the document

Accreditation says something about the firm. The quotation still has to say something about the job: itemised by area and trade, with quantities, units, rates, exclusions and stated payment stages.

A badge on a lump-sum quotation is a firm that has been assessed as reliable sending a document the client cannot check, which wastes the accreditation it paid for.

Check the current requirements before you decide

What is written here is a summary of published scheme information and it is not advice, financial or otherwise. Requirements, fees and bond arrangements change. CASE is the authority on what the scheme currently asks for, and the CCCS guidance on fair trading practices in this industry is worth reading alongside it.