Home-service contractors in Maine

Maine's largest trade by record count is other home service, and it is dominant rather than merely first: more than a quarter of every home-service record this site holds for Maine sits in that one trade, with landscaping the next largest. A concentrated mix like this usually says more about how the source data categorises a business than about how Maine homeowners spend.

In order, Maine's four largest trades are other home service, landscaping, HVAC and electrical. Other home service alone account for half of every record on this page, which is a narrow base for a statewide figure.

Every one of the eleven trades this site counts carries at least one record in Maine, which is not true of every state. The smallest of them here is pool, and a small row is a small row: it is not evidence that Maine is short of that trade, only that few businesses in it were categorised that way.

At the other end of the same ordering, Maine's three smallest trades are pool, pest control and cleaning. Between them they still hold a workable share of Maine, so most of their metro hub pages clear this site's publish floor and publish.

Measured against the national mix, Maine is heaviest in electrical: that trade takes a far larger share of Maine's records than it takes of the country's. Climate, housing stock and how a state's own businesses describe themselves all feed that, and this page separates none of them.

At the other end, pool is far thinner in Maine than it is nationally. A trade this far under the national share is usually one the state's businesses file under a different category rather than one that is genuinely absent.

Per resident, Maine carries more home-service records than the country does, among the ten densest of the fifty-one this site counts. The margin is real but unremarkable, and it moves with housing age as much as with anything about Maine itself.

By raw record count Maine is one of the smaller states in this corpus. Small totals move proportionally more between releases, so a change in a Maine row is weaker evidence of a change on the ground than the same change in a large state.

Maine's split between independent, franchise-brand and corporate-owned records is close to the national one, so the chain mix on this page is typical rather than distinctive.

Far fewer of Maine's records are missing a street address than the national average, which is the mark of a state whose home-service businesses mostly work from a fixed premises.

Almost none of Maine's records are waiting on chain review, so the independent, franchise and corporate counts on this page describe nearly the whole state rather than most of it. Pest control holds what little of the review bucket Maine has.

Read per resident rather than by count, the ordering does not change at the top: other home service is both the largest trade in Maine and the one with the most records per ten thousand residents, and pool has the fewest.

Flooring, landscaping, painting, pool and roofing are the Maine trades in which every record is already classified as independent, franchise brand or corporate owned, with none left in review. The other rows on this page carry at least one name the chain rule has not finished with.

Over the last twelve months more Maine records first appeared than were flagged closed, so the file for this state grew; pest control added the largest share of new records and roofing lost the largest share to closed flags. A record appears when the source learns about a business, which is not the same event as a business opening.

Cleaning, Flooring, Landscaping, Other home service, Painting, Pest control and Pool carry no Bureau of Labor Statistics occupation in the extract loaded here, so those Maine rows have no employment or wage series to sit beside them. Every other Maine row does, by metropolitan area rather than statewide.

Maine owns one metro fact page, for Portland-South Portland, and every trade hub beneath it. A metro is listed under the state its name leads with, so a metro area that crosses into Maine but is named for its neighbour appears on that neighbour's page instead.

Ordered by records per resident, Maine sits between Vermont above it and Wyoming below it. Those two are the states this page's per-resident rate is closest to, and they are named because a rank on its own says less than the company it keeps.

Ordered by total records rather than by rate, Maine's neighbours are Idaho and New Mexico. A state can sit high on one of these two orderings and low on the other, and reading both is the point of naming them.

Of the Maine records that are not independent, corporate-owned locations outnumber franchise brands, and they concentrate in pest control; the most franchised trade in Maine is painting.

Within Maine, pool is the most independently held trade and pest control the least. That gap is the reason the statewide independent share is a summary rather than a description: a homeowner hiring in pest control meets a different market from one hiring in pool.

Pest control is the Maine trade whose records most often carry no street address, and pool the one whose records most often do. A missing street line usually means the business runs from a home, so the list on a pest control page in Maine is thinner in addresses than a pool one and no less real for it.

Maine is outside the verified-licence layer, so no Maine row above carries a licensed share and no Maine profile carries a licence fact. The counts are still measured; what is absent is the join between them and a licence file, which is why the licensed-share row reads as not published rather than as zero.

Until that changes, Maine Office of Professional and Occupational Regulation is where a Maine licence is checked and Maine Attorney General, Consumer Protection Division is where a Maine homeowner takes a dispute. This site takes no complaints about a Maine contractor and resolves none.

Taking the largest row on its own: other home service is about as large a part of Maine as it is of the country, so Maine leads with that trade for the same reason the country does.