Privacy
Last updated 2026-09-14
Plain version: we do not sell your data, we do not run advertising trackers, and a contractor never gets your contact details unless you personally hand them over. 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.
We do not publish contractor email addresses or street addresses, even though the State makes them public. Republishing ~19,000 emails at scale would serve spammers, and many of these contractors work from home.
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. When you claim a profile we show you only a mask (j•••e@g•••l.com) so that a stranger attempting to claim your business learns nothing about you.
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 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, and whether the site says it offers free estimates or emergency service — attributed on the page to the website we read it from, and labelled as unverified. We do this only when the domain belongs to that one registration and the page names the business.
What we never publish this way: your email address, your street address, a phone number found on your website, a link to your website, links to your social profiles, or your logo. 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.
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 email address and whatever you write in the project description. Contractors browsing for work see the job — never your name, email address, or phone number. They bid inside the portal, and you read the bids there.
Your contact details are shared with a contractor only when you explicitly release them to that specific bid, one contractor at a time. This is enforced in our database, not merely in our interface: the software that serves the contractor side has no permission to read your address at all. You can withdraw a release at any time, and you can delete a project whenever you like.
Please do not put your phone number, address, or other personal details into the free-text description — that text is shown to contractors.
Project photos
You attach a photo when you post the project, and can add more once you sign in — up to 8, so contractors can bid accurately. Photos are stored privately — there are no public links to them, ever. They are visible to you, and to registered contractors while your project is open for bids (a contractor who bid keeps seeing them, so an accepted bid still shows what was agreed). You can delete any photo at any time, and deleting a project deletes its photos with it.
Because you attach that first photo before you have an account, it is held against a random one-time code your browser generates — not against you, and not against anything identifying. When you click your sign-in link the photo 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.
Tap-to-call logging
When someone taps the call button on a contractor’s profile, we record that a call button was tapped, for which contractor, and when. We do not record who tapped it — no name, no email, no IP, no advertising identifier, no cookie. It is a counter, and it exists so we can tell contractors how many people tried to reach them.
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 see the contact details a homeowner released to that business: the same name, phone and address the contractor themselves would see, 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.
If you are a homeowner: this does not widen who can see your details. Releasing your contact to a business has always meant the business, and this is us being explicit that a business can be more than one person.
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 sent to the email address on file, or a 6-digit code sent to the phone number on file — either read aloud in an automated call, or texted, 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.
If we invited you by email to claim your listing, that message’s link does the same job in one step: because we sent it to the address on your State registration, clicking it 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 when a contractor bids on it, when a bidder asks you a question, and to confirm when you choose a contractor. If your project is still unconfirmed an hour 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, we tell you when a homeowner asks you something, and when a project you bid on goes to someone else; with a paid Premiere subscription we also tell you when a homeowner posts a project matching the trades and counties you chose. That is the whole list — we do not email you about anything else without asking first.
These messages carry no contact details for anyone. A contractor’s project alert names a trade, a place and a timeline, and nothing about the homeowner — not their name, not their address, not the description they wrote. To read any of it, a contractor has to sign in, and contact details still only ever move when a homeowner chooses to release them.
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.
Text messages, and your mobile information
We send text messages only to people who have explicitly agreed to receive them, and only about their own account — for a contractor, verification codes and notifications about their listing, bids and enquiries; for a homeowner, only bids on their own project. Consent is never a condition of using this site: email, and for contractors an automated phone call, are always available instead. We only text a number you gave us for that purpose. 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 back, we keep that message. We store the number it came from, what it said, and when — so that replying STOP actually stops the messages on our side and not only at your carrier, and so that replying YES can confirm a number you asked us to text. Without keeping it, our records would say you were still subscribed after you had told us otherwise. We do not use these replies 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
We run no third-party analytics and no advertising trackers — no Google Analytics, no ad pixels, no cross-site tracking, and no tracking cookies. What we do keep is 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 bid was placed, a subscription started, a homeowner released their details to a contractor. This log records the action, when it happened, and which account did it — never the contents of your project, your messages, 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.
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