A Demand-Side Benchmark for Consumer-Facing Construction Cost Questions: Price-Figure Span, Output Consistency, and the Case for a Verifiable Reference Layer

Consumers facing home-renovation quotes operate in a classic credence-goods market: they cannot readily verify whether a quoted price is fair, and general-purpose large language models (LLMs) are now a zero-cost place to ask. Whether LLM answers are actionable for this purpose is untested.