Since we launched, the most common piece of feedback from homeowners has not been about price, speed, or service quality. It has been a simpler request: "Can I book the same person again?"
This comes up especially in plumbing. A plumber who has worked in your apartment already knows where the water main is, what type of pipes you have behind the walls, and whether your building's isolation valve is inside the flat or in the corridor. When a new problem occurs, that prior knowledge has genuine value. You spend five minutes explaining context rather than twenty. The professional can make better decisions faster. The job often takes less time as a result.
The same logic applies to electrical work — a professional who has seen your consumer unit and knows which circuits are original versus retrofitted — and, to a lesser extent, tile work and painting, where a professional who has seen your apartment's particular tile pattern or existing paint sheen can bring better materials the second time.
We launched the professional preference feature in January 2026. This post explains how it works, what happens when your preferred professional is unavailable, and where we have not yet found a good solution.
How Preference Booking Works
After any completed job, the homeowner can mark the professional as a "preferred professional" from the job record screen. This creates a preference link stored against the homeowner's account for that service category.
When the same homeowner books a subsequent job in the same category, the booking system checks preference status first. If the preferred professional is available within the homeowner's requested time window — and if they are in the right area for that job — they are offered the booking with priority before it goes to general matching. The preferred professional receives a notification with a 30-minute acceptance window. If they accept, the booking is confirmed to the preferred professional. If they decline or do not respond within the window, the job goes to the standard matching queue.
The homeowner sees their preferred professional's name and photo highlighted on the booking confirmation screen, with an indication of whether the booking was matched to them or matched to another professional because their preference was unavailable.
The Constraints That Limit Preference Matching
Preference matching sounds simple in theory. In practice, there are several situations where it does not work, and we want to be upfront about them.
Same-day bookings have a reduced preference match rate because preferred professionals may already be fully scheduled. Our data shows that preference matching succeeds in roughly 68% of cases for next-day or later bookings, but drops to around 41% for same-day requests. If you need someone today and it needs to be a specific professional, that may not be possible.
Geographic constraints occasionally prevent a match even when the professional is available. A plumber based in Matosinhos who regularly works in Foz do Douro might not be available for a job in Campanhã if the travel time would make their day schedule unworkable. We do not force professionals to accept jobs that would disrupt an already-efficient schedule.
Professional availability changes. A professional might take leave, reduce their availability during busy seasons, or in some cases leave the network. When a preferred professional leaves the network — voluntarily or due to quality issues — we notify the homeowner and invite them to build a new preference over time with another professional in the same category.
Emergency categories. Repeat booking is not available for jobs flagged as emergency-priority: burst pipes, gas leak assessment, complete electrical outage. In these cases, we prioritise the fastest available professional regardless of preference. We are not claiming preference is unimportant for emergencies — we are saying that in the 20 minutes it might take to locate and confirm a preferred professional, significant damage can occur. Speed takes priority over familiarity when something is actively failing.
What Preference Means for Professionals
From the professional's side, being a preferred professional is meaningful. Preferred bookings have a higher confirmation rate — homeowners who specifically want a particular professional are less likely to cancel. Preferred bookings also tend to have higher satisfaction scores because the homeowner starts with a positive expectation, and the professional starts with prior context about the property.
We tell professionals which of their completed jobs resulted in a preference being saved. They do not see the homeowner's personal details before accepting the booking, but they do see a note indicating that this is a repeat booking from a previous customer — which prompts them to review the job record from the prior visit before arriving.
One thing preference booking does not do: it does not lock a professional's schedule for a particular homeowner. A professional is free to accept or decline any individual booking, including from a homeowner who has marked them as preferred. We do not create exclusivity relationships. A professional who is preferred by twelve homeowners and only has capacity for four jobs a day will inevitably decline some preference requests. That is expected and acceptable.
The Relationship Question
Some homeowners have asked whether they can communicate directly with a preferred professional — to check availability before booking, or to describe the job in advance. Currently, direct messaging between homeowners and professionals outside of a confirmed booking is not available. This is a deliberate choice, not a technical limitation.
Direct off-platform communication creates risks for both parties: it bypasses our job documentation system (which is what makes dispute resolution possible), it creates ambiguity about whether the job is covered by OSCAR's terms, and it opens professionals to informal requests that may be poorly scoped or unpaid. We have seen this pattern on other marketplace models — the relationship that starts on the platform gradually migrates off it, with both quality control and protections eroding as a result.
We are not saying homeowners cannot develop real working relationships with professionals they trust. They obviously can, and the preference system supports that. We are saying that those relationships working well for both parties depends on maintaining the structure that makes them fair.
Future Development
The preference system in its current form is relatively basic. What we want to build next is a richer job history layer that preferred professionals can review before arriving — a structured summary of the property's known systems, prior issues, and any ongoing concerns, assembled from previous job records rather than requiring the homeowner to re-explain everything each visit. That would make the preference relationship genuinely more valuable, not just familiarity for its own sake.
We are also looking at whether there is a reasonable way to offer preference matching for same-day bookings at a slightly higher booking fee — essentially compensating the preferred professional for rearranging their schedule to accommodate a priority request. We have not launched that, and we will not launch it without testing it carefully for the incentive effects. But it is something we are thinking about.
If you have a preference booking experience — positive or negative — we want to know about it. Write to [email protected]. The preference system is still early and real feedback from actual repeat bookings is the most useful input we have for improving it.
