How we verify listings

Last updated July 26, 2026

Most contractors on BasementLocal were listed before they ever heard of us. We built their pages from public information. This page explains what we check, what "verified" means here, and what we do not do.

Where a listing comes from

Every listing starts as public information. Nobody pays to be listed here.

Paying does change one thing, and it is easier to just say it: a Featured listing sits pinned above the others on its city page, with a Featured label on it. What money does not buy is a rating, a verification note, or whether a business appears on the site at all. Those work the same way for every business here, paid or not.

A listing is not an endorsement. It means we found a business working in this trade and built a page for it.

What happens before a listing goes live

A new listing is not published the moment we find it. It is held until it passes a quality check:

The business name reads like a real company, not a fragment of scraped text.
The location resolves to a real place, and the city and state agree.
The phone number is well formed and is not already attached to a different listing.
The website, where we have one, belongs to that business rather than to a directory, a franchise parent, or an unrelated company.
The business actually works in this trade, rather than mentioning it once in passing.

Listings that fail are held or archived instead of published. We would rather show fewer businesses than wrong ones.

That is a screen, not a guarantee. Some listings still get through that should not, most often a general contractor who touches this work occasionally. When we find one we move it to where it belongs or take it down. If you spot one, tell us and we will.

What "verified" means on this site

Where a page shows a verification note, it means the information on it was checked against a source on the date shown. It does not mean we inspected the business, confirmed its insurance, or assessed its work. We are not an accreditation body and we do not present ourselves as one.

If a field would be a guess, we leave it empty. A blank phone number is better than a wrong one.

We also do not fake freshness. If we cannot confirm a listing was checked recently, the page shows no verification note at all rather than an old one dressed up as current.

Certifications and credentials

Where a business lists certifications, we show them as separate badges only where we were able to confirm them. An unconfirmed credential is not displayed as a confirmed one. We do not verify insurance, bonding, or workmanship, and no badge on this site should be read as saying we did.

Claimed listings

A business owner can claim their listing for free. Claiming confirms that the person controls the business and hands them the page: description, services, hours, photos, contact details.

Once a listing is claimed, the owner's information wins. We stop writing over it with collected data. If a claimed page disagrees with what we gathered, that is the owner correcting us, which is the point.

Featured is a paid upgrade. It pins a claimed listing above the others on its city page and marks it Featured, so you can see what you are looking at. That is the whole of what it buys. It does not change what we check, it does not affect any rating, and it does not change anything on this page.

Ratings and reviews

Reviews collected by BasementLocal come from customers and are moderated before they appear. We do not buy reviews, write reviews, or remove a review because a business asked us to.

We do not republish another company's exact star score or review count as our own number. Where a summary was written from information published elsewhere, the page says so.

What we do not do

We do not sell leads, and we do not sell the same inquiry to several businesses.
We do not take payment to change a rating, a verification note, or whether a business is listed. Paid placement is the Featured pin, and it is labeled where it appears.
We do not remove a competitor's listing on request.
We do not verify insurance, bonding, or quality of work.
We do not promise any business a number of calls or customers.

Something wrong on a page?

Tell us and we will fix it. That includes businesses that want their listing taken down entirely. Email will@localpro.dev, or use the claim link on the listing.

A correction from the business itself outranks anything we collected.