In this article
A solar and roof replacement lead is a homeowner who wants solar and needs a roof first, qualified for both on the same call. Roof condition is the most common reason a solar deal dies after the site visit, and almost nobody sells leads for the combined job.
Disclosure: theBuildd publishes this article and sells exclusive, phone-qualified residential leads in both solar and roofing. We put ourselves first in the comparison below and apply the same questions to our own offer. Every figure here is either an industry source, a price published on a vendor’s own page and dated, or arithmetic we show in full.
The disqualifier that costs more than price
Ask a solar installer why deals stall and price comes up first. Track the ones that actually die, and roof condition is usually the reason.
The physics are unforgiving. A residential array is a multi-decade asset. A roof with five years left is not. Mounting panels on it means paying to remove and reinstall them when the roof is redone, and that removal cost lands on the homeowner who thought they were done spending.
So the installer stops. The homeowner is told to sort the roof out first, and the deal enters a limbo it often never leaves.
That is a failure the industry treats as bad luck. It is not. It is a qualification question nobody asked before the truck rolled.
Roof age is a one-question screen. Asking it before the site visit costs nothing. Asking it after costs a site visit, a proposal and usually the deal.
What the combined job is actually worth
Solar and roofing are two of the largest tickets in residential home improvement. Industry figures put a typical residential solar system at $16,000 to $28,000, and the average full roof replacement at $17,631 in 2025.
Put them on the same house and the combined project sits somewhere between roughly $33,000 and $45,000. These are industry-wide figures, not theBuildd results, and your local pricing will differ.
That is the upside. The constraint is that it only exists if you can deliver both jobs, in-house or through a roofing partner you actually trust with your customer.
How the market sells this today
| # | Provider approach | Roof condition asked before delivery? | Sold as one job or two? | What the contractor inherits |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | theBuildd (we publish this article) | Yes — roof age and condition as the homeowner reports it, on the qualifying call | One lead, one buyer, one territory | A homeowner already told a person their roof’s age |
| 2 | Exclusive solar vendors | Sometimes, varies by vendor | Solar only | A solar lead that may fail on roof condition |
| 3 | Shared solar marketplaces | Rarely stated publicly | Solar only, sold to several contractors | The same risk, split across competitors |
| 4 | Roofing lead vendors | Not applicable | Roofing only | No solar intent captured |
| 5 | Buying both separately | Two vendors, two qualification standards | Two leads, two prices | Two records to reconcile for one house |
How we compared. The table applies three criteria to every provider including our own: whether roof condition is screened before the lead is delivered, whether the result reaches the contractor rather than being filtered silently, and whether the solar and roofing sides are sold as one record or two. We credit a provider only where it states its position publicly. We checked vendor pages on 20 August 2026 for public statements about roof-condition screening in solar lead qualification. Where a vendor publishes nothing about it, we have written “rarely stated publicly” rather than assuming it does not happen. Absence of a published policy is a reason to ask, not proof of a gap.
The arithmetic, with every input named
Here is the calculation worth running before you decide a combined lead is worth more to you. Every input below is an assumption you should replace with your own number.
Start with 100 solar leads.
- ASSUMPTION: 20 of them fail on roof condition. Use your own rate — pull the last 50 dead deals and count.
- To a solar-only installer, those 20 are worth nothing. The lead cost is already spent.
- To an installer who can attach a roof job, each one carries a potential $17,631 roof project.
- ASSUMPTION: you close 25% of those roof opportunities. That is 5 roofs.
Five roofs at $17,631 is roughly $88,000 of work that a solar-only operator writes off entirely. Change the two assumptions and the number moves, which is exactly the point — run it on your own figures rather than ours.
Now the cost side. theBuildd’s published rate is $3,000 a month, or $2,500 with promo code LAUNCH25. Typical volume is 10 to 15 qualified leads a week, which depends on trade, territory size and local demand, and is not a guaranteed floor.
At 10 leads a week, $3,000 a month works out to about $69 a lead. At 15 a week it is about $46. With the promo rate those figures become roughly $58 and $38. Third parties report exclusive solar leads elsewhere at $200 to $500, which is the comparison worth making — against your own cost per booked job, not against a sticker price.
The sequencing problem nobody prices in
Solar already has the longest clock in residential home improvement. Industry figures put contract-to-operation at three to five months, with permitting alone accounting for 51 days or more.
Now insert a roof replacement in front of it.
The roof is not an add-on that runs alongside the solar work. It is a prerequisite that has to finish before mounting begins, and it carries its own scheduling, its own weather dependency and its own inspection. A homeowner who agreed to a spring switch-on can find themselves looking at late summer.
That is not a reason to avoid the combined job. It is a reason to say the timeline out loud at the first conversation, because the alternative is a customer who feels the goalposts moved.
Sequencing also changes who owns the relationship. Whoever does the roof is on that roof first, talking to the homeowner for a week before a single panel arrives. If that is a partner rather than you, decide in advance whose customer this is.
In-house roofing versus a partner
The combined lead is only valuable if somebody completes both halves. There are three ways to do that and they are not equally good.
In-house. Highest margin, hardest to staff. You control scheduling, quality and the customer relationship end to end, and you carry the crew cost in months when solar demand is thin.
A roofing partner. Fastest to set up and the most common arrangement. The risk is that your customer’s experience of the roof phase is entirely in someone else’s hands, and any failure there attaches to your brand.
Referral only. You hand the roof off and re-engage afterwards. Lowest risk, lowest return, and the highest chance the homeowner simply gets solar quotes from whoever the roofer recommends.
Pick one before you buy combined leads rather than after. The lead is the same either way; what changes is whether you can convert it.
What to ask a lead vendor about roof screening
Four questions separate a vendor that screens for this from one that does not.
- Do you ask about roof age or condition before delivering a solar lead? If yes, ask for the exact wording used on the call.
- Is the answer passed to me, or only used to filter? A filtered-out lead you never see is a decision made on your behalf.
- What happens if a homeowner’s roof turns out to be far worse than reported? This is a lead-quality question with a replacement policy attached, or it is nothing.
- Can I buy the roofing lead and the solar lead as one record? Most vendors cannot, and the honest ones say so.
We publish our own answers to all four above rather than making you ask.
What we ask, and what we do not
Our five-person in-house call team speaks to every homeowner before a lead is sent. For a solar enquiry that includes roof age and condition as the homeowner describes it, alongside homeowner status, intent to hire, and basic eligibility.
What we do not do matters just as much. We do not inspect roofs, we do not run credit checks, and we do not qualify financing. A homeowner saying their roof is eighteen years old is a signal to bring a roofer to the site visit. It is not an engineering assessment and we do not present it as one.
The lead reaches you by text and email in under ten minutes, while the homeowner still expects the call. Bad leads are replaced, every time — that is a replacement, not a refund, and if a cash-back remedy is what you need, we are the wrong provider.
Where a combined lead is the wrong buy
Being straight about this matters more than the sale.
If you install solar and have no roofing capability or partner, a combined lead is worth less to you than a clean solar lead. You will spend the same money and inherit a project you cannot complete.
If your business is commercial solar, this is not your product either. We qualify residential homeowners, and commercial is at most something to mention on the call.
And if your pipeline problem is that leads never answer rather than that deals die at the roof, fix response time first. Buying a better-qualified lead does not help a business that returns calls the next morning.
Testing it in 30 days
Run this as a measurement, not a leap of faith.
Track four numbers on every solar lead for a month: whether roof age was known before the site visit, whether the deal stalled on roof condition, whether a roof job was offered, and whether it closed. That is a spreadsheet, not a system.
A $200 one-time trial delivers four to seven exclusive, call-verified leads, which is a small enough sample to test the qualification standard without committing to a monthly plan. Whatever you conclude, you will finish the month knowing your real roof-disqualification rate — which is the number this entire article turns on, and the one almost no installer currently tracks.
You can see how the same exclusivity argument plays out across the trade in our breakdown of exclusive versus shared solar leads, and what the market charges in our solar lead cost guide. For the vendor landscape, see the best solar lead generation companies. Our own offer sits on the solar leads page, and the roofing side explains how storm and replacement work is qualified.
One buyer per lead, roof age asked up front.
Territory is locked by zip code and trade, a real person qualifies every homeowner, and the lead reaches you in under ten minutes.