In this article
Every contractor has a version of the same story. You paid for leads, the leads were bad, and the money was gone before anyone picked up the phone.
Usually the problem is not that leads do not work. It is that “lead” is being used to describe four or five very different things, and nobody agreed on which one you were buying.
This is the plain version: where contractor leads come from, what changes when a lead is exclusive to you, and how to work out what one is actually costing your business.
What a contractor lead actually is
A lead is a homeowner who has shown they want work done in your trade, in your service area, and has given contact details you are allowed to use.
That is the whole bar. Notice what is not in it. A lead is not a booked job. It is not a signed contract. It is also not a name that appeared on a form because someone was curious about the cost of a new roof at eleven o’clock at night.
The gap between those two ends of the range is where most of the money gets lost.
The word "lead" is doing too much work. Before you compare two providers on price, make them tell you exactly what has to be true about a homeowner before they will call it a lead and charge you for it.
Where contractor leads come from
There are only a handful of real sources. Everything else is a variation on one of them.
| Source | Who owns the relationship | Typical speed | Main risk |
|---|---|---|---|
| Shared marketplaces | The marketplace | Fast | The same homeowner is sold to several contractors |
| Exclusive lead services | You | Fast | Higher price per lead |
| Paid search and social ads | You | Fast once running | You are also paying for the learning curve |
| Local SEO and Google Business | You | Slow to start | Takes months before it produces |
| Referrals and repeat work | You | Unpredictable | Cannot be turned up when you need it |
| Door knocking and canvassing | You | Slow per contact | Costs labour hours, not ad spend |
Most contractors end up using two or three of these at once, and that is usually right. The mistake is treating them as interchangeable, or judging all of them on cost per lead when they have completely different close rates.
Exclusive against shared: the difference that decides the math
This is the fork in the road, so it is worth being precise about it.
A shared lead means the homeowner’s details are sold to more than one contractor. Three, four, sometimes five. Everyone who bought it is now calling the same person about the same job.
An exclusive lead means the homeowner’s details are sold to exactly one contractor. When you call, you are not the third roofer that morning.
The sticker price on a shared lead is lower, and that is real. What it hides is that you are also buying a seat in a race. You pay whether or not you win, and the contractor most willing to quote below cost tends to win the ones you lose.
These are industry-wide figures for shared against exclusive lead performance, not theBuildd-specific results. What you see depends on your trade, your territory and how fast you follow up.
What a lead should have to prove before you pay for it
The difference between a good lead source and a bad one is almost never the volume. It is what the source is willing to filter out before it invoices you.
Here is the bar we hold a homeowner to before anything reaches a contractor:
- They own the home, or can authorise the work on it
- They want work in a trade we actually serve, not something adjacent to it
- They want an estimate, an appointment or the work itself, not "information"
- Their phone number and email are real and reachable, because a person just used them
- They are in a zip code that is licensed exclusively to the contractor receiving the lead
A form submission cannot tell you most of that. A phone call can. That is the entire reason a real person makes the call before a lead goes out.
Want to see the bar applied to your territory?
Every homeowner is called and confirmed by our team before the lead reaches one contractor: you.
How to work out what a lead really costs you
Cost per lead is the number on the invoice. Cost per closed job is the number that decides whether you made money.
Work it out like this:
- Take what you spend on a lead source in a month.
- Count the jobs you actually closed from it, not the estimates you gave.
- Divide the first number by the second.
That is your real cost per job from that source. Run it for every source you use, and one of them usually turns out to be much worse than it looked.
The second number worth tracking is how many hours your team spent to get there. An hour spent chasing a homeowner who already hired someone else is an hour that produced nothing, and it does not show up on any invoice.
Track cost per closed job by source for one full quarter before you change anything. Most contractors discover the cheapest leads are the most expensive work, and the reverse is also sometimes true. Either way you want the data, not the hunch.
How fast you have to call
Of everything on this page, speed to first contact is the part most within your control and the part most often ignored.
A homeowner who asked for an estimate this morning is a different person by this afternoon. They have moved on, or someone else has already booked the visit. The window is short, and it closes quietly.
That is why leads go out by text and email within 10 minutes of being qualified. It is also why the qualification call matters twice: the homeowner is not just confirmed, they are expecting your call.
What to ask before you sign anything
Take this list to any lead-generation company, including us.
Ask this
- Is this lead sold to anyone else, ever?
- Who qualifies the homeowner, and how?
- What exactly happens when a lead does not meet the bar?
- How is my territory defined, and who else can buy in it?
- What am I committed to, and how do I stop?
Watch for this
- "Qualified" with no definition behind it
- Guaranteed close rates or guaranteed revenue
- Territory described as a region rather than zip codes
- A credit process that is difficult on purpose
- Long contracts with an early-termination fee
We will answer all five straight. Leads are exclusive to one contractor with no exceptions. A five-person in-house call team qualifies every homeowner. We do not offer refunds, but a lead that does not meet the bar gets replaced. Territory is locked by zip code for your trade. It is month to month, and you can cancel it.
Cheaper is not the same as less expensive. Judge a lead source on what it costs you per closed job and on the hours it takes to get there, not on the price of the lead. Then ask who else got the same phone number.