A marketplace is only as good as the information going into it. “Need retaining wall fixed” cannot be matched to the right trade, cannot be quoted without a site visit, and cannot be scheduled. Four extra words often fix all three.
What actually makes a job matchable
Three things, and only three are needed to start:
- What is wrong, in your own words. Not a category — a sentence. “The kitchen sink will not drain and water is backing up” is worth more than “plumbing”.
- Where. Confirmed to a suburb, because distance is the heaviest thing in the ranking.
- How soon. Urgent, a particular day, or whenever suits. This changes what happens next more than anything else you enter.
Why you are not asked twenty questions
Because you would stop answering, and a half-finished job helps nobody.
Your description is read and a trade is suggested from it, across thirty trades and a hundred and twenty specialties. If it is clear, you confirm and move on. If it is genuinely ambiguous — a retaining wall could be a landscaper, a concreter or a builder — you get one follow-up question with real options, not a form.
And you always have the last word on the trade. A wrong trade sends the job to the wrong tradies, and on an urgent job that means waking a plumber for an electrical fault. One extra tap is cheaper than that.
Nothing is allowed to block you posting
If the trade suggestion is unavailable, or unsure of itself, you get the ordinary trade picker and carry on. It is a shortcut past a list, never a gate in front of one — and when it is not confident, it says so rather than quietly committing you to a guess.
What a good brief buys you
Better-matched tradies, prices that mean something without a site visit first, and fewer calls that begin with twenty minutes of questions you have already answered.
It buys the tradie something too: enough to decide whether the job is theirs before they spend anything on finding out.