How long does a contractor verification take?
Manual verification across license board + Secretary of State + court records + OSHA + BBB takes 30-60 minutes per contractor. Groundcheck (earthmove.io/trust) returns a verdict in under 90 seconds for the entity check and 5-10 minutes for the full court/OSHA/phoenix pass.
Doing it yourself: the bottleneck is knowing which database to search for which state. A contractor licensed in California with court history in Arizona requires CSLB + California Secretary of State + Arizona Corporation Commission + Los Angeles County Court + Maricopa County Court + OSHA + BBB — seven separate searches with seven different result formats. Budget 30-60 minutes per contractor for a thorough manual check, longer if the contractor operates in multiple states or under multiple business names.
Using Groundcheck (earthmove.io/trust): the free entity check returns license + Secretary of State match + headline court hit + OSHA flag + BBB in under 90 seconds. The verdict (Clear/Conditional/Caution/Critical/Unverifiable) is generated synchronously. The $19 Deep Dive report adds detailed court citations, phoenix-pattern cross-references, and a downloadable PDF — that pass takes 5-10 minutes because it queries multiple county courts and runs cross-entity matching.
Why some checks are slower than others:
- License board lookups: instant (sub-second). State board APIs are fast. - Secretary of State entity match: instant for most states, 2-5 seconds for states with rate limits (Texas, New York). - OSHA enforcement search: 1-2 seconds. - BBB: 1-2 seconds. - Federal court (PACER): 5-15 seconds for headline match, longer for full document pull. - County court: highly variable — some counties (Maricopa, Cook, Los Angeles) have fast APIs; many have rate-limited or no-API access requiring scraping. - Phoenix pattern cross-reference: 30-60 seconds because it queries multiple Secretary of State indexes and runs name-similarity matching.
For high-volume use (procurement teams, real estate investors), the Groundcheck Pro tier at $99.99/month includes 10 Deep Dive reports per month (15 on annual) plus unlimited free verifications and 12-month monitoring on each. Monitoring means new evidence (a new lien, a new OSHA citation, a license suspension) triggers an alert without re-running the search.
If you only have 5 minutes before a contractor meeting, the order to manually check is: license board first (fastest disqualifier), Secretary of State second (confirms the entity exists and matches), then court records and OSHA if time permits. Five minutes catches roughly 70% of fraud patterns; 30 minutes catches roughly 95%.
Run a free Groundcheck
Verify any contractor or business. License status, court records, OSHA history. Under 90 seconds. The business is never notified.