Privacy
Last updated 2026-10-29
Plain version: we do not sell your data, we do not run advertising trackers, and you choose when to share your completed project and contact details with signed-in Premiere contractors. The detail is below.
This policy is issued by Favorite Followers LLC, trading as Iowa's Best Contractors, which operates contractiowa.com and is the business responsible for the personal information described here.
What we publish about contractors
Listings come from the Active Iowa Construction Contractor Registrations, a public record published by the Iowa Department of Inspections, Appeals, and Licensing under Iowa Code ch. 91C. For each contractor we publish: business name, owner of record, city, county, ZIP, trade, registration number, registration status, and the business phone number on the public record.
The phone number is published deliberately. It is a public record, and a directory you cannot call anyone from does not work. Withholding it protected nobody, the State hands the same number to anyone who asks, for free.
A business owner who has claimed a listing chooses what it shows: the business name they trade under, their own phone number in place of the one on file, and whether the State’s phone number, owner of record and registered name appear at all. The registration number and status always stay, because they are what the listing is.
We do not republish the email addresses or street addresses the State holds, even though the State makes them public. Republishing ~19,000 emails at scale would serve spammers, and many of these contractors work from home.
Contact details a business publishes itself, or confirms to us, can appear on its listing. This changed on 15 September 2026. A listing may show: an email address printed on the business’s own website; the business address and website shown on the business’s own Google listing (never the address of a business Google lists as serving customers at their location, which is often a home); and, once a contractor has claimed the listing, the email, phone numbers, business address and mailing address they confirmed, email and addresses only if they choose to show them. Confirmed means a code sent to that email or read in a call to that number, a match with the State record or their identified Google listing. Selecting an address from Google’s suggestions alone does not confirm that it belongs to the business.
Where a business based outside the state says it works can appear too. This changed on 6 October 2026. The State’s record gives a business based outside the state no city or county here. If the owner of a claimed listing picks counties and trades in their account, that listing is shown on the city, county and trade pages for those places, marked as serving them. It is the owner’s statement, not the State’s record, and the counts on those pages do not include it. With no county picked, nothing is shown this way.
The contractor emails we hold but never show
We do store the email address the State has on file for each registration, server-side only. It is never displayed, never sent to a browser, and never sold. Anyone who selects a business on the claim page sees only a mask, such as frr•••@gmail.com or in•••@•••.com (up to three leading characters, never more than half of the address before the @), and the last four digits of the registration phone. Searching or selecting a business does not send a message or claim it.
We use it for two things. First, verifying that a contractor claiming a profile really owns it. Second, we may write to it once or twice to tell you your listing exists and invite you to claim it. That is marketing email, and we say so plainly rather than pretending otherwise. Every such message carries a one-click unsubscribe that we honour immediately and permanently. Unsubscribing stops the email and nothing else: your listing is built from the State’s public register and stays exactly as it is.
When a registration leaves the State’s public register, we keep what we hold and mark the business as no longer registered. We never write to a business that is not on the register, and if it registers again we refresh its details from the State’s record. An address that asked us to stop writing stays suppressed whatever its registration status.
When one of our emails contains a link, we record which link was clicked and when, so we can tell which wording is worth sending and stop sending what is not. That is all we record, no IP address, no device or browser fingerprint, no location, and no tracking pixel in the message. We do not record whether you opened it, only whether you chose to act on it.
Because we compare wording, two contractors may receive slightly different versions of the same email. Every version states only things we can show you the evidence for. The difference is which true thing it leads with, never whether it is true. The unsubscribe link is never routed through anything: it goes straight to opting you out, so leaving is never slower than arriving.
Reading your business’s own website
If the email the State holds for your registration is at your own domain, say office@yourcompany.com. We may visit the public pages of that website and note things that could fill in your listing: the description you already wrote, what you say you do, a phone number, opening hours, links to your social profiles. We read at most three pages, one at a time, and identify ourselves honestly as IowasBestContractorsBot. We do not log in anywhere, submit anything, or read anything a visitor could not.
Some of it may appear on your listing before you claim it. This changed on 22 August 2026, and this page previously said the opposite. What we show, and what we never do, is set out exactly below.
If you have claimed your listing, nothing is published without you. Everything we find is held privately and shown to one audience only: you, in your dashboard, under “From your website”. It appears on your public listing if, and only if, you press the button that adds it. You can dismiss anything, and a dismissal is permanent: we do not ask again on the next pass.
If nobody has claimed the listing, we may show a short description, a tagline, the year the business started, what the site says it does, whether it offers free estimates or emergency service, opening hours, a logo, another phone number the site lists, the email address the site prints, and links to the website and social profiles, attributed on the page to the website we read it from, and labelled as unverified. Links from a listing that is not on Premiere are marked nofollow. We do this only when the domain belongs to that one registration and the page names the business or prints the phone number on the State record.
What we never publish this way: the email address the State holds, a street address read from your website, or an email address at somebody else’s domain. We also do not republish claims we cannot stand behind. If the text says “licensed”, “certified” or “best”, we drop it rather than repeat it, because an Iowa registration is not any of those things. If you claim your listing, you can edit, replace or remove any of it.
We do this because a listing with nothing on it helps neither you nor the homeowner looking for you, and almost every contractor with a website has already written this material once. Confirming beats typing. You can remove any of it at any time, claim the listing free and edit or delete it, ask at hello@contractiowa.com, or use the correction form. Tell us and we will exclude your registration from this entirely.
If you post a project (homeowners)
We collect your first name, your email address and whatever you write in the project description. We also record the website path where you submitted the request, without its query string or referring address, to measure which pages lead to confirmed projects and contractor replies. A request holds the property address, a statement that you own or are authorized for the property, and a budget band; size, finish, a phone number and photos are optional. You can answer them on the request form before you have an account, or in your dashboard after. Once you confirm your email and those three answers are in, we email the registered contractors who cover that trade and area your first name, town, project type and budget. Premiere members also get your description and timing. Contractors who have claimed a listing see the same four facts in their dashboard. An email never carries your email address, street address or phone number. Premiere members see the rest of your request in their dashboard and send their quotes in the portal, where you read them.
We try to confirm your address with Google as you choose it, including before you have an account. For a verified address, we may add matching county assessor facts through Zillow’s Bridge Interactive: bedrooms, bathrooms, living area, year built, lot size and land use. These are labeled public records and may be incomplete or out of date. We do not request or store the owner of record, deeds or property values. You can enter an address manually if verification or records are unavailable.
Who sees your address, phone and email. After you complete the request and agree to share, a signed-in Premiere contractor with bidding access can read them on your open or awarded request, so they can reach you about their quote; every other contractor sees only your first name, town, project type and budget. Nothing emails or texts them to anyone. This is enforced in our database, not merely in our interface: the software that serves the contractor side has no permission to read those columns at all, and the one function that returns them checks the membership and the open request first. Each quote shows the contractor’s public name, phone and profile, and either side may reach out. A project takes quotes for 14 days and then closes; you can close or delete it sooner.
Who was reached. Your dashboard shows every contractor we told about your request and how (email, text, a call, or an email to the address on the State record), which of them looked at it in their portal, and which quoted. Those are the contractors’ public business names from the State registry. While your request is open we may email you that summary, at most once a day and only when something changed. Nothing about you is in that list or that email.
Please do not put your phone number, address, or other personal details into the free-text description. That text is shown to Premiere members.
Project photos
You can attach photos when you post the project, and add more once you sign in, up to 8, so contractors can quote accurately. Photos are stored privately, there are no public links to them, ever. They are visible to you, and to Premiere members while your project is open for quotes (a contractor who quoted keeps seeing them). You can delete any photo at any time, and deleting a project deletes its photos with it.
A photo you attach before you have an account is held against a random one-time code your browser generates, not against you, and not against anything identifying. It leaves your device only when you send the request, and when you click your sign-in link it is attached to your project. If you never sign in, it is deleted within a day and nobody ever sees it. Nothing about that upload is readable by anyone until it belongs to a project you own.
Photograph the job, not your life. These are pictures of your home that strangers quoting the work will see, keep faces, mail, documents, and anything showing your address out of frame. We do not analyse the photos, we do not use them for anything except showing them to bidding contractors, and we never sell them.
Accounts
Signing in is by emailed link; we do not ask for or store a password. We store your email address, your role (homeowner or contractor), and a session in your browser’s local storage so you stay signed in. That session is functional, not tracking.
Contact button logging
When someone presses a contact button on a contractor’s profile (call, website, email, booking or a social link), we record which contact button was pressed, for which contractor, and when. That record holds no name, no email, no IP, no advertising identifier and no cookie. It is a counter, and it exists so we can tell contractors how many people tried to reach them. The same press is also counted in our analytics, described below.
Administrators a contractor appoints
A contractor on Premiere can appoint someone, an office manager, an assistant, a family member, to run their listing for them, and can choose exactly which parts they may touch. If the contractor grants it, that person can edit the listing, send quotes and read the listing’s numbers, and nothing more.
We record who granted the access, when it was accepted, and what it covers. The contractor can withdraw any part of it, or all of it, at any moment, and it ends automatically if their claim on the business ends. An administrator can never appoint further administrators, and can never unclaim or transfer the business.
Verification calls, texts and emails to contractors
A contractor can only claim a profile through the record the State already holds: a 6-digit code or a secure link sent to the email address on file, or to the phone number on file, by text or (for a code) read aloud in an automated call, whichever they choose. Those messages are transactional. They are sent only because someone asked to verify that registration, only to the details the State has on file, and never as marketing.
You can request a secure claim link from the business search, by email or by text. We send it only to the email or phone on that registration, never a contact supplied by the requester. It expires in 15 minutes. Opening it shows the listing; you must press its confirmation button to continue. Pressing it signs you in with the registration email. When a texted link's registration has no email, or shares it with another registration, you sign in with the email you want to manage the listing instead. We record requests, acknowledged sends, link opens and confirmation presses separately. Texting requires your explicit agreement, which we store word for word and mark confirmed only when the link is pressed on the registered phone.
If we invited you by email to claim your listing, that message’s link does the same job: because we sent it to the address on your State registration, confirming the claim signs you in to that address and claims the profile, no code to retype. It proves the same thing the 6-digit code proved. That you control the inbox the State has on record. So it is the same door, not a weaker one. Anyone without that email cannot use it, the link expires after 60 days, and nothing about the business can be changed without completing that sign-in.
Telling you when something happens
If you post a project, we email you once for each quote a contractor sends, and if no quote came in 14 days, once when the project closes. If your project is still unconfirmed a few hours after you posted it, we send one reminder, once, never more, because until you confirm, no contractor can see it. If you are a contractor who has claimed a listing, we email you when a homeowner posts a project matching the trades and counties you chose (Premiere members two hours before everyone else). That is the whole list. We do not email you about anything else without asking first.
These messages carry no homeowner contact details. A contractor’s project email carries the job, the place, the timeline and what the homeowner wrote, and nothing about who they are: not their name, not their email, not their address. Either side can make contact after the homeowner completes the request.
Email notifications are on by default because they are the thing you signed up for; every one of them carries a one-click off switch, and you can change them any time in your portal. Turning them off never removes a listing, cancels a project, or deletes anything. It only stops the message. We record which notifications we sent you and whether they were delivered, so we can tell whether the service is actually working.
Phone calls with an automated assistant
When you claim a listing, we place one automated welcome call to the phone number on that listing, as our Terms describe, and if you call our number, the same automated assistant speaks with you. The call is recorded and transcribed. You hear that in the first sentence of every call, and you agree to it when you claim: the wording you were shown is stored with the time, the number and the version. We keep the recording and the transcript for twelve months so we can check what was said and improve how we help, then we delete the recording and keep only a short summary. We keep a record that the call happened, what you asked for and whether you told us to stop, and we never call a number that asked us to stop. You can stop calls at any time by telling the assistant, by pressing Stop calls in your portal, or by writing to support@contractiowa.com. The free listing stays exactly as it is whether or not you take the call or stop calls. We only call the number on the listing you claimed, the one on your State registration or the one you verified, and the assistant never reads your number, email or address back to you. If you ask for your recording or transcript, write to support@contractiowa.com. The conversation runs on ElevenLabs over a Twilio telephone line, both acting for us under contract; ElevenLabs keeps its copy for at most thirty days, and Twilio carries the call but keeps no recording of it.
Text messages, and your mobile information
Unless you text us first, we send text messages only to contractors who have agreed to receive them, and only about their own listing: a verification code they asked for; if they switch it on in their account, a short note when a homeowner posts a project matching their trade and county; and, under our Terms when they claim a listing, one note to the listing’s number when our welcome call leaves a voicemail. Before that note we check with our carrier that the number is a mobile and keep the line type and carrier with it. We do not share, sell, or provide your mobile phone number or messaging consent data to third parties or affiliates for marketing or promotional purposes. We do not text homeowners, except to answer a text they sent us. Consent is never a condition of using this site: email, and an automated phone call for a verification code, are always available instead. We only text the number you agreed to receive texts at, or the number that texted us. Message frequency varies, message and data rates may apply, and replying STOP stops all messages. Opting out never removes a listing. Full detail is on the text message terms page.
When you consent, we record the phone number, the moment you agreed, and the exact wording you were shown. We keep that record because the law requires us to be able to prove what you agreed to. It is evidence, not profiling, and it is never used to market to you.
If you text us, we keep that message. We store the number it came from, what it said, and when. A person on our team reads it so we can get back to you. If you text our office line, whether you are a contractor or a homeowner, our automated assistant may answer you there: your text and the conversation so far pass through ElevenLabs, which keeps its copy for at most thirty days, and Twilio, both acting for us under contract. It answers only a text you sent, and it sends no offers. Replying STOP actually stops the messages on our side and not only at your carrier, and replying YES can confirm a number you asked us to text. We do not use your texts for anything else, and we do not build a profile from them.
No mobile information is shared with third parties or affiliates for marketing or promotional purposes. Text messaging originator opt-in data and consent are never shared with any third party. We use a licensed messaging carrier purely to deliver the message you asked for, and it may not use your number for anything else. We do not sell your phone number, and we never will.
How we measure the service
When Google Analytics is enabled, we measure page visits and site actions such as searches, button presses, claim and quote steps, and video watch milestones. Video events identify the video, page, percentage actually played, playback position and video length. We do not send the State-held email, registration phone, claim token or sign-in link to Google. Analytics may use cookies; advertising storage and personalization are disabled. We also keep a first-party record, in our own database, of the platform actions that matter to running it: an account was created, a profile was claimed, a project was posted, a quote was sent, a membership offer was displayed, checkout was attempted or failed, a subscription started. This log records the action, when it happened, and which account did it, never the contents of your project or the contact details themselves, which stay protected as described above. It exists so we can keep the service working, prevent abuse, and understand how many people are using it. We do not sell it, and we run no advertising against it.
Our contact page shows a small Google map of our mailing address. Your browser loads that map directly from Google, which receives your IP address and browser details and may set its own cookies under Google’s privacy policy. We send Google nothing about you for it, and no other page loads it.
Who we are, and what we do with contractor data
Iowa's Best Contractors is a registered trade name of Favorite Followers LLC, which owns and operates this site. We market products and services from BizRnR, a separate company, to contractors who claim a profile. If you claim a profile, you can opt out of that marketing at any time, and opting out never affects your listing, which stays free and complete either way.
Deleting your data
Contractors can correct or remove a listing at any time. Anyone with an account can ask us to delete it, along with their projects, bids, and messages. Write to us and we will do it.
Contact
Favorite Followers LLC
500 Locust St
Des Moines, IA 50309