Many homeowners believe they can’t do without these two perks: home warranties that promise to replace appliances that cannot be repaired, and Angie’s List, the popular website that recommends contractors and repair specialists.

But both have come under fire recently by key consumer organizations, which say neither is as valuable as people think.

The Consumer Federation of America, a national organization made up of more than 250 nonprofit consumer groups, took Angie’s List to task for, among other things, “always” listing advertisers first and granting only those businesses that advertise on its site a “top rated” designation. Angie’s List “is subject to conflicts of interest because it is supported almost entirely by payments from the businesses it evaluates,” the CFA report said.

It also faulted the site for granting “A” ratings to businesses with less than five reviews -- and sometimes only one -- and not providing reliable information about which charge the lowest prices. Furthermore, it found “circumstantial evidence” of fake reviews posted by some service providers.

Meanwhile, warranties were blasted by Consumers’ Checkbook, a branch of the independent nonprofit consumer group called Center for the Study of Services. Consumers’ Checkbook publishes regional magazines in seven cities, and these publications carry no advertising and accept no referral fees from the outfits evaluated.

The group found that warranties are not worth the money, and are often rip-offs.

“These warranties are terrible deals and simply aren’t worth their price tags or hassle,” its latest report said.

Even the biggest player in the field, a spokeswoman told me, has had more than 10,000 complaints lodged against it over the last three years.

A major fault with warranties, which are actually service contracts as opposed to guarantees, is that you don’t get to decide which contractors come to your house to repair your appliance and determine whether it must be replaced. Indeed, the study found that the best repair services “overwhelmingly disdained these types of warranties” and won’t work for home warranty companies.

Case in point: air-conditioning contractors. Checkbook randomly queried 20 that received its top rating for quality, and discovered that not one participated in any warranty plan.

There are other issues, too. Contracts are loaded with numerous “fine-print gotchas” that could be used to deny your claim, the report warned. Also, you’ll be responsible for paying a fee for the repair technician’s initial visit. Replacement appliances could be limited to certain brands, colors and manufacturers. And you could be strung out for months before a decision is made about whether an appliance will be replaced.

In my own personal experience, my warranty company waited almost six months to rule that my double oven could not be salvaged, even though the repairman who tried three times to fix it had said so three months earlier. And then, if I wanted the company to cover the replacement cost, I was required to buy the new one from a certain store that is nearly bankrupt, and from a limited list of options that did not include the original brand.

Checkbook says it finds no fault with warranties offered by builders of new homes. But if you are buying an existing house on which the seller offers a one-year warranty, you’re better off asking the seller to give you a credit at closing for the warranty’s price.

As for Angie’s List, rather than rely solely on the site, CFA says you need to do some extra legwork on your own. Don’t take the site’s recommendations at face value, it suggests. Look beyond those, and read reviews posted only on A-rated businesses with at least 25 recent testimonials, paying close attention to comments and negative reviews. The site “can provide value to those who utilize the website appropriately,” the report says.

It also says the site shouldn’t be the only source you use to select a service provider. Consumers should rely on nonprofit groups that evaluate local business and are not funded by the companies they study, says lead author Stephen Brobeck, a CFA senior fellow and its former executive director.

It might be better to ask others directly about their experiences. And try searching the web by a company’s name paired with such terms as “consumer complaints,” “bad service,” “rip-offs” or “sucks.”

CFA chose to assess Angie’s List as its first investigation into online review services “because of its longstanding popularity and reputation.” Founded in 1995, Angie’s List is visited by more than 20 million people a year to access information from some 10 million individual ratings and consumer comments.

The site stopped charging an annual subscription fee in 2016, and is now funded almost entirely by advertising, referral fees and payments from the companies it evaluates. Also in 2016, it became part of a holding company that includes HomeAdvisor, a similar service that connects homeowners with local service providers, including home improvement and remodeling contractors. But the two remain separate for now.

“Angie’s List looks as if it is becoming HomeAdvisor, but it is not there yet,” Brobeck told me in an email. “Both aggressively push advertisers, but AL continues to maintain a huge database of customer comments on individual businesses. There may be other differences as well, but we haven’t studied HA closely enough to be sure.”

Homeowners who sell their houses “as-is” may end up costing themselves more than they would have spent to make the necessary repairs -- if they are able to sell their homes at all.

For one thing, most buyers these days don’t want to buy a house that needs work. Fixer-uppers are OK for flippers, who are increasingly putting their own money into the houses they buy, as opposed to just relying on appreciation to make a buck, according to real estate analytics firm CoreLogic.

But for the most part, families want a move-in ready place. They don’t want to mess with replacing worn carpeting, remediating a patch of mold or painting the walls.

“If you don’t want to do the work,” says Jeanne Gregory of RE/MAX Southwest in Sugarland, Texas, “what on earth makes you think your buyer does?”

Equally important: Most buyers have no idea what the necessary fixes might cost. So they tend to double or even triple what it would cost the seller to do the work, and then reduce their offer by that amount. Consequently, sellers net less -- sometimes far less -- than if they’d bitten the bullet in the first place.

Chris Ann Cleland of Long & Foster Real Estate in Gainesville, Virginia, calls dumping the work on your buyer a “pain in the a

tax,” and says the cost associated with doing what’s necessary “goes up in their minds and is deducted from the seller’s list price.”

And don’t even think about offering your buyer a credit to cover the cost of repairs. That usually doesn’t work, either.

Credits rely on the buyer’s imagination, say Sally and David Hanson of eXp Realty in Brookfield, Wisconsin. A credit is “an open invitation,” they added, for an uneducated guess from an uneducated buyer.

Brian England of Arizona Focus Realty in Gilbert agrees. “Credits don’t work,” he commented. “Buyers will take it and often offer less, as well, so it is a double whammy.”

All the agents hit on a common theme: The eye buys. So do what you have to do to fix up your place, even if it’s unpleasant or time-consuming. Otherwise, be prepared to wait a while for one of the few buyers willing to take on your headaches. Prepare yourself, too, to accept less than your asking price.

A while back, Mary Hutchison of Better Homes and Gardens Real Estate in Kansas City, Missouri, was working with a seller who didn’t want to repair, declutter or clean his place. After several showings and two months on the market, he finally got the message. But it was too late, she said, and he did not get the price he wanted.

“If you really want to attract serious homebuyers, keep your contract from falling through and get the best possible price, you need to swallow hard and fix the house,” advises the team of Crispin Ang, Ross Sit and Bernadette Santos at Realty One Group Alliance in the San Francisco Bay area. They know of many sellers who refused to spend $5,000 in repairs, only to sell for $15,000 less than what they wanted. “The cost of making repairs easily outweighs the price of digging in your heels,” they posted on the ActiveRain real estate site.

If you absolutely, positively can’t make the repairs -- no money, no time -- consider obtaining estimates in advance for all the work that need to be done. That way, you can use them to give your buyer a more reasonable idea of the cost, rather than relying on them to guess or obtain their own -- often inflated -- estimates.

If you are thinking about offering a credit, you can base it on your estimates, as opposed to leaving the amount up to the buyer’s imagination.

Finally, a word of caution to buyers who are thinking about buying an as-is residence: Think again.

“As-is sales are best left for flippers, who have the skill to rehab them well and put them back on the market,” says Myrl Jeffcoat of GreatWest Realty in Sacramento, California.

Texas agent Gregory agrees. “Chip and Joanna (Gaines) have deep pockets and sponsors,” she says. “Most buyers don’t.”

Young buyers who want to buy a home and put sweat equity into it “are usually really disappointed,” said Candice Donofrio of Next Wave Real Estate Investments in Bullhead City, Arizona. “Because it’s like cockroaches. Where there’s a little bit of a problem now, there’s a big problem you haven’t seen yet.”

The housing markets have taken another hit as a result of the Trump administration’s immigration policies.

Those policies have already taken a toll on the construction sector, where there are currently an estimated 404,000 job openings -- openings once filled, at least in part, by immigrants, some of whom probably came into the country illegally.

Now, the Department of Housing and Urban Development has said that so-called Dreamers are no longer eligible for federally insured mortgages. Dreamers are covered by a 2012 executive order signed by President Barack Obama -- called Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, or DACA -- that allows young people who were brought to this country illegally by their parents to avoid deportation.

According to federal estimates, there are nearly 800,000 Dreamers in the United States. They grew up here, and consider themselves American in every way except on paper. Though mostly Latin American in heritage, they come from two dozen different countries.

The HUD ruling reverses a longstanding “look-the-other-way” position that Dreamers qualify for loans backed by the Federal Housing Administration under certain circumstances. Not only were most lenders caught off guard by the change, it also is contrary to what HUD Sec. Ben Carson told Congress earlier this year.

In response to a question during hearings in April, Carson said that the government’s policies on FHA loans for Dreamers had not changed. He said he had checked with the FHA and “no one was aware of any change that had been made to the policy whatsoever.”

“I’m sure we have plenty of DACA recipients who have FHA mortgages,” he told lawmakers.

When President Obama signed the DACA executive order, then-Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano said the policy “confers no substantive right, immigration status or pathway to citizenship.”

The FHA had a long-maintained policy that non-citizens without legal residency are ineligible for government loans. For the most part, neither lenders nor the FHA paid any attention to that policy. But last year, the FHA quietly began telling lenders that Dreamers were no longer eligible, leading to confusion in the market. And now HUD has made its stance official.

Len Wolfson, HUD’s assistant secretary for Congressional and Intergovernmental Relations, said in a mid-June letter to California Rep. Pete Aguilar that “because DACA does not confer lawful status, DACA recipients remain ineligible for FHA loans.” He said the FHA has long maintained that non-citizens without legal residency do not qualify.

Democrats in Congress have already taken steps to change the new policy. The House Financial Services Committee has cleared legislation that would ensure DACA recipients cannot be denied federally backed mortgage because of their immigration status.

Because the party controls the House, the measure is likely to clear that body. But a similar bill in the Republican-controlled Senate may not go anywhere, especially because it goes beyond the House measure to include loans purchased by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and guaranteed by the Department of Agriculture’s Rural Housing Service.

The Senate bill is sponsored by a dozen Democrats. Among them are a number of presidential hopefuls, including Kamala Harris, California; Amy Klobuchar, Minnesota; Kristin Gillibrand, New York; Bernie Sanders, Vermont; and Cory Booker, New Jersey.

In the new construction sector, meanwhile, about 30 percent of all construction jobs, both residential and commercial, are held by non-native-born individuals, according to Census Bureau data. But in some states, immigrants take a larger share -- 42 percent in California, for example, and 41 percent in Texas.

There’s no way of knowing how many undocumented immigrants work in the housing sector. Builders won’t talk about it, and when pressed, they say it is up to their subcontractors, not them, to determine the status of the workers they employ.

But Robert Dietz, the chief economist at the National Association of Home Builders, says he has heard “anecdotal evidence” from some of his members that last month, when President Trump announced an impending widespread roundup of immigrants targeted for deportation, there was “increased absenteeism” on job sites throughout the country.

According to the NAHB, the concentration of immigrants is particularly high in such key trades as carpenters, painters, drywall installers, brick masons and laborers. These are trades that require less formal education, but consistently register some of the highest shortages reported by builders.

As of April, the number of construction-sector job openings was at a post-Great Recession high. The lack of labor is the top issue for builders, more challenging than the cost of land or materials, or even the cost of local building and zoning regulations.

The labor shortage impacts new construction in several ways. It takes longer to build and, if a builder is forced to hire inexperienced people, there’s likely to be more than the normal number of defects -- mostly cosmetic, but possibly structural -- that will have to be addressed before or after buyers move in.

But if builders hold out for experienced workers, it’s likely to increase their costs, which is almost always passed on to buyers in the form of higher prices. And that, of course, contributes to the primary hurdle facing today’s buyers: affordability.