Burke and Sons

Seventy-five permits in 2025 alone, and nearly all of them are the same handful of jobs: a boiler, a furnace, a gas line, a water heater. Burke and Sons is a Haverhill plumbing shop — BuildZoom lists James Burke and Milton R Burke as owners — with 428 permitted projects on record and 173 of those in the last three years. The trend is the most useful thing here. The count runs 34 permits in 2023, 64 in 2024 and 75 in 2025, at a typical value around $2,000. That is heating-and-hot-water work rather than remodelling, and the shape of it says a busy shop getting busier, not one coasting on an old record. The licensing entries are the part to check. BuildZoom lists a Massachusetts plumbing business license, #2727, as active but explicitly marks it "License Not Verified", last seen carrying a May 2026 expiration — a date that has now passed. It also shows a master pipefitter license, #MA14402P, as inactive, noting the Massachusetts Department of Public Safety recorded it as cancelled at one point. None of that has been confirmed against the state registry here, so ask for the current license number and verify it yourself before any gas work. The gap is the customer voice. BuildZoom carries no reviews for them, and nothing written by a homeowner turns up anywhere else in this record — so there is a great deal of evidence that they do this work, and none at all about what hiring them is like. For a boiler swap or a water-heater replacement, that permit history is real evidence of a shop doing this constantly and locally. Ask for two addresses from this year's jobs, confirm the license is current, and get the equipment price and the labour quoted separately.