By 1news.co.nz and is republished with permission
He was the contractor with the reassuring social media profile – there he was with his crew, hard at work, doing the job, happy to be front and centre.
It was a profile that ensured clients paid Uhatahi Handyman Ltd thousands up front, in advance of the job.
But what happened once the money was paid? In some cases, very little work, a lot of excuses, and then from Ian Uhatahi, no replies to phone calls and emails.
“I feel a little silly that someone has taken my money, but I don’t want him to do it to other people,” said Carmen Michie.
The Waikato property manager hired Ian Uhatahi and his crew to build her a small deck at her own home in Rangiriri, after first testing his skills and reliability by having him build her a small garden wall.
That went well but the deck, planned for a week leading up to Christmas 2022, is still just a bunch of posts sticking out of the ground, one so close to the back door that it stops it fully opening.
But it’s the loss of trust as much as the loss of hard cash that stings for Michie.
“I’m really embarrassed to say he’s got $6000 of mine.”
That sum represents nearly 80% of what Uhatahi had quoted her to complete the deck. Then he told her he had fallen from his truck at work, and said he couldn’t complete the job on time or send his workers to do it while he recovered. Then he went quiet for the summer.
Michie did “the 2023 thing; I stalked him on social media” – which is legit, as that’s where Uhatahi had been advertising his business, on numerous local community Facebook pages.
Michie said Uhatahi told her he was on holiday, then sick, then simply wasn’t answering her as he continued to take on new work.
“I saw him in a video on Facebook, coming back through Auckland airport. I thought, “wonder if he’s bought me some duty free?”, Michie remarked wryly.
She was puzzled and disappointed. She hadn’t taken Uhutahi completely on blind trust; she’d done a fair bit of due diligence including checking on his details with the Companies Office to look for any red flags like previous liquidations; she tested him with that much smaller landscaping job and best of all, she was dangling the carrots of many more jobs in the future, in her role as a property manager for the landlords.
“Good tradies, there’s lots out there but they’re also super busy, so when you find them then you stick to them, especially in property management because they do help you out of tight spots,” said Michie.
She’d done something customers sometimes struggle to do, and had a very blunt conversation about budget blowouts right upfront, just before paying that hefty deposit for the deck.
“I said to him, ‘are you sure this is going to cover everything? Because I don’t want to have an awkward conversation either during the time that you’re building or at the end where you’re gonna go ‘oh actually i haven’t covered my costs, I need some more money’, I said. ‘Cos it’s probably going to be more awkward for you when i say ‘no’.”
Months later she would still be chasing answers when others joined the hunt.
Cary and Estelle Clendon had been encouraged by those social media posts to also part with nearly 80% in advance – $21,000.
Theirs was for a driveway, a fence and a small rock wall. The fence is still in bits in the garage, the rock wall is up but looks rough, and the driveway never happened.
“The day before the concrete was coming, I came home and thought they should be throwing the rest of the boxing in… there’s nobody here so alarm bells started ringing,” said Cary Clendon.
Estelle Clendon called the concrete supplier and got a nasty shock.
“‘We will deliver, once you pay for it’, and I was like, this guy’s sitting with our money since the beginning of March!
“And has it to this day – though, where exactly?”
Fair Go got on the trail, diving deep into Companies Office records to find old mobile phone numbers that led to a person who was listed as a former company director alongside Uhatahi, but had never heard of him and could show proof they were not the same person who’d signed off the documents.
Fair Go also visited numerous addresses in Auckland’s south to hear the same story over and over – Uhatahi didn’t live there or hadn’t for a long time. Fair Go was apparently just the latest in a string of visitors – the others had been chasing debts or jobs not done.
The same love of social media had not left the missing contractor and after connecting with a Facebook page for Tongan expats, Fair Go found numerous videos on an account that showed Uhatahi largely at leisure on Tongatapu, the main island of Tonga.
One of the house calls also bore fruit, with a former business associate offering to try to put Fair Go in touch with Uhatahi. They could confirm Uhatahi had received the messages to call us back with his side, but had not replied.
His customers have learned a hard lesson.
“You trust and that’s what we did and it burned us,” said Estelle Clendon.
They want to share that lesson, as does Michie.
“It’s really just about stopping him from doing it to other people, and him being accountable for his rubbish actions.”
