Desperately seeking services no more

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The old ways of locating tradies are going out the door.

A new website allows businesses to compete against each other for your hard-earned dollar.

Oliver Pennington is the co-designer of serviceseeking.com.au, a website that takes the Yellow Pages to a whole new level.

"Builders, tradesmen, all the way through to web designers, lawyers, accountants, panel beaters, pretty much anything you can think of," he said.

Users decide how much they are willing to pay for a service and how long they are willing to wait to have the job done.

Then sit back and let businesses fight over the job.

"The power of the internet is to connect people and to tap into networks of people very efficiently and easily," Mr Pennington said.

"We are going to see more people searching for service businesses online and less people doing it the traditional way."

He said the service is very useful for young people and first home buyers who have not much, if any, experience in dealing with tradespeople.

"They've never done a renovation before, they haven't perhaps engaged a solicitor to do a conveyance for them," Mr Pennington said.

But it is not all bad news for tradies. Ranald Kogan runs a 35-year-old painting business, and in the past he has relied on the old ways of getting work, mainly word-of-mouth.

Now he has gone hi-tech, registering with serviceseeking.com.au and he bids on the jobs he wants.

"Some people have budgets and we can see if we can work to the budgets or not, which allows the website to still be profitable for us and economically feasible for the others," Mr Kogan said.

Service seeking has only been running a couple of months, but it already gets 20,000 hits a month and more than 2500 tradesmen around the country have registered to bid for work.

To ensure a level of quality, the makers have a mechanism called the service score, which is a feedback rating by users, similar to the responses about sellers on eBay.

Alex Pulletti works full time and has two young boys, so she doesn't have time to hunt for tradesmen.

She tendered two paving jobs as part of a major renovation of her multi-story home through the website.

"A friend at work told me about it and I thought what a great idea and I ended up using them for the last two jobs," she said.

Already 20 business categories are online, but unlike eBay, bidding goes down, not up.

And not all the requests are the norm.

One girl was seeking a topless male waiter to cater for a hen's night.

"(She) got several responses and were very happy with the work that was done," Mr Pennington said.

Internet bidding is also shaking up the $9 billion tourism market.

A new website allows people to bid against each other for rooms that would normally sit vacant, with up to 50 per cent off the usual rate.

Former hotel manager Garry Burman is behind ubid4rooms.com.au, where you offer what you want on the room of your choice.

"Depending on occupancy, there is a 20 to 30 per cent chance they will take it," he said.

And you can bid on as many rooms in as many hotels and locations as you like.

For more information, check out www.serviceseeking.com.au and www.ubid4rooms.com.au