THE HAMMERING HEADACHE OF HOME REPAIRS

As housing prices climb and mortgage loans become costlier and scarcer, more and more people find themselves forced to stay in older houses for longer than they would like. Sooner rather than later, pipes crack, paint peels--and homeowners have to face up to the often traumatic experience of calling in that new aristocrat of the U.S. labor force, the repairman.

Accelerating demand for the repairman's services has turned him into a big businessman; estimates of his yearly volume range up to $12 billion. His business is also the leader in consumer complaints, which are climbing almost as rapidly as the wages of carpenters, plumbers, glaziers and electricians. Typically, the Chicago Better Business Bureau last year counted 2,178 protests against the performance of home remodelers, substantially more than the number of gripes registered against the runner-up, the auto-repair business. Home repair is characterized by maddening delays, shoddy workmanship and startling expense.

To induce a contractor even to come to the house is difficult; if the job involves less than $500, it may be impossible. A Northbrook, Ill., woman who wanted to have the trim and eaves of her brick ranch house painted, called more than a dozen contractors but failed to get so much as an estimate from any of them. A Houston homeowner who accepted a repairman's offer to re-roof his house says: "He showed up two weeks late and immediately demanded an additional $200 for materials. He abandoned us three times, and I had to call and raise hell each time to get him back. After he left, we found the roof leaked, and it cost us another $250 to get it fixed right."

At Their Mercy. Complaining consumers are the victims of a classic economy of scarcity, which enables contractors and repairmen to charge what they please and get away with it. The need for their services is enormous because few homeowners can perform any complex repair jobs themselves. Construction unions make sure that wages stay high by keeping the supply of craftsmen inadequate to meet the demand In the Oakland, Calif , area, the number of union plumbers, currently 900, is actually shrinking because the union is training only ten apprentices this year. Anachronistic spread-the-work rules prevent the most efficient use of the men who are available. An Oakland contractor who is a master plumber, for example, is forbidden to work more than four hours on any one job himself. He must leave the rest of the work to less-expert hired hands.

The labor shortage enables individual repairmen to charge high hourly rates not only for the time they spend working. The $9-an-hour rate quoted by many an independent plumber applies from the time that he answers a homeowner's phone call to the time he returns to his own house after finishing the work. Contractors often charge the homeowner twice as much for hourly labor as they actually pay their workers in wages. They can do so because in many towns the relatively few contractors who can sign up scarce union help are in a near-monopoly position.

In Chicago, a homeowner may pay the main contractor on a remodeling job $15 an hour for a carpenter whose wages are $6 05 an hour. The difference is made up by fringe benefits, payments to subcontractors--and a 50% to 60% markup that covers the contractor's overhead and profits. In addition, contractors usually buy pipe, lumber and other materials at discounts, but charge the homeowner the standard price plus "delivery costs." The markup over the contractor's price ranges from at least 10% in Chicago to 30% in Miami.

Trusting to Luck. So much money is involved that ambitious contractors can quickly build substantial businesses. Chicago's Tony La Pelusa, for example, started a tiny contracting firm at the age of 19. He picked a specialty--installation of aluminum siding, windows and eaves--and advertised heavily. Today, at 26, he owns three trucks, employs eight workers and farms out work to subcontractors. Vincent Bardis, 40, a former salesman, has built a bigger Chicago business by coordinating the work of 36 subcontractors. His firm has booked $750,000 worth of business so far this year. For some other contractors, repair and remodeling work have served as the launching pad into house-construction. William Adkison and Ralph DeMeo, a couple of Florida carpenters who were earning $2.83 an hour a decade ago, joined to start A.D.H. Construction Co. The firm did extensive remodeling work, earned enough to begin building apartment houses. It recently moved into a Taj Mahal-like building, which has a steam room, sauna, exercise room and bar.

The man who resents paying the high price of home repairs has few alternatives. Some save by acting as their own contractors, buying materials at the contractor's discount and employing moonlighting carpenters and electricians. The moonlighters generally charge only their actual wage rate, plus perhaps a dollar an hour. But few homeowners are able to estimate the quantity, sizes and types of materials that a job may require; even fewer know enough to supervise and coordinate the work of the craftsmen. It would take an expert to tell the good workmen from the many others who produce most of the grumbling about warping walls, quick-cracking concrete and misconnected electric lines. A homeowner can weed out the worst contractors by consulting his local Better Business Bureau, and the BBB can sometimes prod a contractor to correct faulty work. Most of the time, however, the harried homeowner must trust to hunch--and luck.

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