The Real Math of Shared Roofing Leads

Say a homeowner in Tampa needs a new roof. She googles "roof replacement quote," lands on a comparison site, and fills out one form. Simple enough. Except most homeowners don't stop at one site. Reviews and forum threads from contractors describe the same pattern over and over: she fills out that form on Angi, then HomeAdvisor asks for her info too, then a Google search result for Thumbtack looks legitimate so she tries that as well. Three or four forms, same roof, twenty minutes of her afternoon.

Each of those sites doesn't just take her request and quietly match her with one roofer. It sells that request. Publicly reported ranges for a shared roofing lead run $100 to $250, and each site typically resells the same request to three to five contractors. Do the multiplication: one homeowner, submitting to three or four platforms, each platform selling to three to five roofers, and you land somewhere around eight to twelve contractors all calling about the exact same roof.

Who Actually Wins That Roof

One of you. Maybe. The homeowner picks whoever calls first, quotes best, or simply answers the phone while she's still on the couch deciding. The other seven to eleven contractors who bought that lead? They paid for a phone call that went nowhere, or a voicemail nobody returned.

Run the marketplace side of that math too. If five sites each sold the same roof at roughly $150 a pop, that's $750 collected across the industry on a single job. One roof. Five separate payments. One contractor wins the work. The marketplace gets paid regardless of who does.

Sit with that for a second, because it's the whole game. That homeowner request, the exact same one four marketplaces sold to twelve roofers between them, is the entire product those marketplaces exist to sell. It's what they charge $100 to $250 a lead for, and what they write a 12-month contract to lock you into buying over and over. On FloridaContractorCheck, when that same kind of request lands in your exclusive Radar + ZIP, it's included at no extra charge. No shared form, no invoice, no other roofer racing you to the phone. We give away the thing they lock you into a contract to buy. That's how much we think the rest of the platform is worth on its own.

The Number That Actually Matters: Cost Per Job Won

Contractors who track this closely report close rates on shared leads somewhere around 10%, sometimes lower depending on the trade and the season. That number changes the whole conversation. A $150 lead isn't a $150 lead once you factor in how many you buy before one turns into a signed job.

At a 10% close rate, $150 per lead works out to roughly $1,500 in lead spend for every roof you actually close. Push the close rate down to 5% (a bad month, a saturated ZIP, a lead quality dip) and that number doubles to $3,000. None of that includes materials, labor, or the fact that the homeowner is also fielding calls from everyone else who bought her.

And that's before the contract terms. Public reviews of the major lead platforms mention 12-month commitments, early termination fees, and lead-credit refund requests that get denied more often than approved. None of that shows up in the "$150 per lead" pitch. It shows up on the invoice six months in.

A termination fee is a retention strategy dressed up as a policy. It keeps you paying after the leads stop converting, because leaving costs more than staying does. Radar + runs the opposite way: month to month, no contract, cancel whenever you decide to (an annual prepay exists if you want the discount, it's never required). We'd rather be worth keeping than have a fee do that job for us. Walking away costs nothing, but the ZIP doesn't wait around: cancel, and your exclusive territory opens to the next contractor on the waitlist. The contract isn't what keeps our subscribers. The territory is.

The Other Way to Find the Same Roof

Here's the part most lead marketplaces never mention: you don't need a homeowner to fill out a form to know her roof is old. Florida building departments keep permit records, and a roofing permit from 2009 tells you almost everything you need to know. The average asphalt shingle roof in Florida runs about 15 years before it needs replacing. A permit date does the math for you.

That's the inversion. Instead of waiting for a homeowner to raise her hand (and sell that raised hand to a handful of competitors), you start from the property record itself. Radar + reads permit data across an exclusive ZIP code, one contractor per trade, and surfaces the homes where the roof, AC, or water heater is aging out. Nobody else in your trade gets that same ZIP. There's no bidding war because there's no auction to begin with.

To be clear about what this is and isn't: this is not a list of intent signals. We aren't claiming that homeowner is sitting by the phone waiting for your call. We're showing you a roof that's statistically due, on record, in a territory that's yours alone. What you do with that (a letter, a call, an estimate left at the door, a crew already working the street) is your call to make.

Who This Actually Works For

This isn't for the contractor who wants a phone that rings on its own. If that's the business you want to run, buying shared leads and hoping you're first to call is a legitimate strategy, just an expensive one. Radar + is built for contractors who are already comfortable making the first move, and want intelligence nobody else in their ZIP has instead of a form nobody else has read yet.

We wrote out the full economics, the calculator, and the exact feature list on the roofing leads comparison page if you want to run your own numbers. And if you're specifically weighing Angi against the alternative, we broke that down separately in Is Angi Leads Worth It for Roofers?

Common Questions

Every roof on your street has a permit somewhere with a date on it. That date is public information right now, whether or not you're the one reading it. See what Radar + finds in your ZIP →