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It’s a Saturday night in January. It’s 44 degrees outside, and the air con in a house in Irymple has just died. There are two kids inside, and nobody is sleeping tonight unless someone fixes it.
The mum does what almost everyone does now. She picks up her phone and searches for air con repairs in Mildura.
Three listings come up near the top.
The first has a review from last week. Five stars, a customer thanking the tech by name, and a reply from the owner the same afternoon. There are photos of real installs and real vans.
The second looks fine at a glance. Then she scrolls, and the newest review is from 2023.
The third has one review. It’s a single star, and it says the phone number on the listing doesn’t work.
She rings the first one. The whole decision takes a few seconds.
The owners of the other two businesses will never know she existed. No missed call, no message, nothing to follow up. The job goes somewhere else, and their day carries on like any other.
That’s the part that stings. You can’t see the work you never got.
She isn’t a real customer. Every detail on those listings is real, though. Each one came from actual Mildura trade listings we checked this month.
We checked all 42
Pear Tree Media looked at every plumber, electrician and air conditioning business in Mildura with a Google listing. There are 42 of them.
Six got a new Google review in the last 30 days. Between them, those six hold 365 of the 775 reviews across the whole group. That’s nearly half, sitting with one business in seven.
The other 36 are not bad businesses. Most of the reviews they do have are glowing. One local plumbing family has a review from a customer who has relied on them for more than 40 years. Their listing has seven reviews in total.
Four decades of good work, and a stranger scrolling at 10pm sees seven reviews, the latest from June.
That’s the pattern across town. The work is good. The proof just isn’t showing up.
The quiet half
The median Mildura trade business has three Google reviews. Ten of the 42 have none at all.
24 of the 42, or 57%, haven’t had a new review in six months or have never had one. Electricians are the quietest group, with a median of two reviews each.
Most of these businesses aren’t losing customers they already have. Those customers ring back without checking Google. The loss is the new customer: the family that moved to Mildura last year, the landlord managing a rental from Melbourne, the bloke whose usual plumber retired. They have nobody to ask. They have a phone, and a list of names, and a few seconds.
What they find when they look closer
A customer who can’t choose between two listings starts reading. This is what they read in Mildura right now.
Owners replied to 22 of the 82 most recent reviews on these listings, which is 27%. Two thirds of the businesses with reviews didn’t reply to any of their latest ones.
The one star reviews are where the silence costs the most. Of the nine recent one and two star reviews we found, seven have no reply. One plumber’s listing carries a detailed complaint alleging a quote that climbed from $8,000 to $20,000. It has sat there for over a year with no response, and it’s one of the first three reviews anyone sees. The business may well have its side of the story. Nobody reading that listing will ever hear it.
Then there’s everything else. 14 listings still show Google’s “Own this business?” prompt, which suggests nobody has claimed them. Four in ten have one photo or none. Three plumbing businesses that have permanently closed still appear in Mildura results, taking up space in the same list as the ones answering their phones.
What the six do differently
Nothing clever. They aren’t better tradies than the rest of the town, and nobody we found is gaming Google.
Every one of the six has new reviews arriving month after month. Every one has more than ten photos of real jobs on its listing. Two of them reply to every review they get, including the three word ones.
All they’ve done is make good work visible to someone who has never met them.
The gap grows every month
A business that picks up three reviews a month adds 36 in a year. A business that picks up none stays exactly where it is, and every month the listing above it looks a little more trusted than theirs.
Next January there will be another 44 degree night and another dead air con, and another family scrolling through the same short list.
Before then, try this. Open Google Maps on your phone and search for your trade in Mildura, the way a customer would. Search the trade, not your business name. Look at the first three listings that come up, read them as a stranger would, and ask yourself which one you’d ring.
About this data
Pear Tree Media collected this data on 27 September 2026 from public Google Maps listings. The sample covers 42 plumbing, electrical and air conditioning service businesses in Mildura. It excludes national chains, supply stores, automotive electricians and listings marked permanently closed. Review recency and reply rates come from each listing’s three most recent reviews. No individual businesses are named.
