Home Services Top Consumer Complaint List

WASHINGTON —  In the Maryland suburbs, a shadowy unlicensed company bilked customers out of $3,495 for computer training it never gave. In New Jersey, a dentist calling himself the “Cavity Buster” pressured patients to wire money to his bank account.

Those were among the worst scams reported Tuesday in a national survey. Home improvement services and auto sales sparked the most complaints from consumers, but gripes about household goods outpaced those about auto repairs, two consumer groups said.

Auto repairs, a perennial thorn, fell to fourth on the ninth annual list of consumer complaints put together by the National Assn. of Consumer Agency Administrators and the Consumer Federation of America, both based in Washington.

And Internet complaints--mostly over ordered merchandise--have risen nearly 40% a year since 1997. Other fast-growing complaints regard car title fraud and utility services.

This is the first time the survey has ranked household goods among the top three consumer complaints, and the first time in six years that auto repairs has not joined auto sales and home improvements in topping the list.

Credit and lending ranked fifth on the survey of 49 respondents, almost all of them city, county or state consumer agencies that handle consumer complaints. The survey uses 1999 figures, the latest available.

“There’s been an increase in household goods complaints,” said Wendy Weinberg, a spokeswoman for the National Assn. of Consumer Agency Administrations, who pointed to robust sales of items such as computers and furniture. “With the strength in the economy, people have been making more purchases in those areas.”

At the same time, home improvement services for the first time overtook auto sales as the No. 1 complaint category, according to the consumer groups. In the previous year’s survey, nearly three-quarters of the complaints were about auto sales, a slight percentage higher than there were about auto repair and home improvement.

“There really is not a governing body for home improvement. That’s the biggest complaint about the industry is that it’s unregulated,” said Blanche Evans, publisher of Agent News and associate editor of Realty Times, both Dallas-based online services. “Curiously, we regulate Realtors who sell the properties, but we don’t regulate the people who build or improve them.”

And often when people buy homes, they “fall in love” with a property and overlook problems that surface later, Evans said.

The top 10 complaints: home improvement services, auto sales, household goods, auto repairs, credit and lending, utilities, mail order, collection, landlord-tenant disputes and leisure-travel. In last year’s survey, which used 1998 figures, the top 10 were: auto sales, auto repairs, home improvement, household goods, credit and lending, mail order, auto leasing, landlord-tenant disputes, utilities and travel-tourism.

“A car is such an important necessity that if there is a problem they’re more apt to complain,” said Michael Morrissey, spokesman for the National Automobile Dealers Assn. “But we still feel it’s more the exception rather than the rule that a customer would be dissatisfied.”

Morrissey cited an Automotive Retailing Today study not yet publicly released saying three of every four people who bought a new car in the past year and a half were highly satisfied. He said U.S. car dealers anticipate selling almost 18 million new cars, trucks and minivans in 2000, up from 16.9 million in 1999.

While holiday shoppers for household goods might find reason for pause, the consumer groups’ newest survey also finds elderly consumers are among the fastest-growing targets for scams. To help deal with that trend the survey’s respondents--government agencies providing consumer services and pro-consumer groups--were asked to report the scams they most frequently run across, which are in home improvement and sweepstakes.

The survey, done each year since 1992, is performed by the National Assn. of Consumer Agency Administrators, representing 165 consumer agencies in the United States and several other countries, and the nonprofit Consumer Federation of America, made up of 260 groups.