How this was built, and where it is weak

Building the contractor dataset

Companies were identified from franchise and brand locators, Better Business Bureau category listings for the DFW cities, industry association member rosters, and contractors' own websites. Each candidate was then opened directly to confirm a phone number and a live website, and its BBB profile was opened where one existed.

Rows then went through an automated pipeline that enforces the standard mechanically rather than trusting anyone's judgement, including ours. It drops any row missing a phone or website, strips source URLs from lead-generation domains, requires service labels to match our eleven-item taxonomy exactly, merges duplicates on website domain and then on phone number, and refuses to publish a company with no confirmed coverage inside the six-county footprint.

The pipeline also produces a QA report on every run listing exactly what it dropped, merged, and flagged. In the launch build it merged six duplicate companies and flagged several with no published city list and several with no taggable service list.

What the coverage counts mean

A number next to a city is the count of verified companies that publish coverage of that city. It is not a census of contractors operating there, and it is not comparable to a count from a platform that lists every business with a mailing address. Multi-market companies legitimately appear on many city pages; a small operator that does excellent work but never names a city on its website appears on none of them.

Where the cost figures come from

Every price on this site is a figure someone else published, and the publisher is named at the point of use. We prefer, in order: a Dallas–Fort Worth contractor's own published price list, a Texas contractor's price list, an industry association standard, a regional cost guide, then a national cost index.

Three of the most useful sources — the only ones that publish itemized cost-of-goods breakdowns per pier — were published in 2021 and 2022. We used their structure and their ratios between methods, and took absolute dollar figures from 2026-dated sources wherever both existed. We also excluded several 2026-dated pages that quoted four mutually contradictory per-pier prices across four pages of the same website.

One thing worth knowing about the national average: the three sources that publish it, around $5,200, all trace back to a single dataset. Treat it as one anchor with three presentations, not three independent confirmations.

Known limitations

• No license field. Texas does not license foundation repair contractors as a trade. We tried to add an engineer-license column from state directories during the build and the relevant state sources were unreachable, so there is no license data here at all rather than partial data.
• Uneven geographic depth. Coverage is deepest in Dallas and Collin counties and thinnest in Ellis County, which has no tier-one city page of its own — only slivers of Grand Prairie and Mansfield, plus communities like Waxahachie, Ennis, and Midlothian that we list by name without pretending to have built pages for them.
• Service tags are incomplete by design. A company is tagged for a service only when it names that service on its own pages. Several companies do work they never itemize online, so our service pages undercount rather than overcount.
• Truncated service areas. Some BBB service-area listings are cut off with a "more service areas" link. Where that happened, the profile notes that coverage may be broader than shown.
• Conflicting BBB records. Several multi-location companies have different ratings on different branch profiles. We show the conflict on the profile rather than choosing.
• No basement pricing. Roughly 4% of new Southern homes are built with a basement, and we found no Texas-specific published pricing for basement waterproofing. We left that cost range blank instead of importing a national number and calling it local.
• No slab-versus-pier-and-beam split for DFW. No published figure exists for the existing housing stock. We cite Census new-construction data for the South region as a labelled proxy and otherwise describe the split by housing vintage.
• No reviews or ratings of our own. Deliberate. We are not in a position to judge workmanship, and an aggregate score built from lead-selling platforms would be worse than nothing.

How often this changes

The dataset is rebuilt whenever a correction comes in and re-checked in batches. Because the entire site is generated from one dataset, a correction to a company propagates to every city, county, and service page it appears on at the same time. Current totals: 77 companies and 275 cited source pages.

Read the verification standard →