Stop Paying for Shared Foundation Repair Leads

You are paying for a phone number that two or three other shops already called. Do this today, before anything else: pull last month’s invoice from whoever sells you those leads, count the jobs you actually signed off them, and divide what you paid by that count. That one figure is what shared foundation repair leads cost your shop, and it ends the argument you have been having with yourself for a year.

Everything under this is how to read that number and how to get off the lead buying without putting an empty week in front of your estimator.

The vendor runs the advertising, catches a homeowner with a cracked wall, and sells that same homeowner to you and to the other shops on their list in your area. Everybody who bought him gets the same name at roughly the same minute. The homeowner, who thought he filled in one form, now has four shops calling him before lunch, and he stops answering around the third.

That is why the leads feel worse every year even when the price goes up. Nothing about the homeowner changed. What changed is how many people are holding his number when you dial it.

It also explains the pattern sitting in your own records, where the ones you win tend to be the ones you happened to answer in the first few minutes. You were not better on those calls. You were first.

Most owners argue about the price of one lead, which is the wrong end of it. Take the whole month instead. Add up every dollar that went to the vendor, including the top-up you forgot about, then count the jobs that were signed and sold off those leads in the same window. Divide the first by the second.

Now run the same sum on the work that came from your own phone, your trucks and your referrals. Those two numbers are rarely anywhere near each other, and the gap between them is the thing worth fixing.

The second number to write down is how many of the leads you never reached at all. Not the ones who said no. The ones who never picked up. In a shared pool that figure is usually ugly, and it is the cleanest proof that you were third in line. Run both through the cost calculator if you want it laid out for you.

Every lead seller has a credit process, and on paper it looks like your money is safe. In practice a credit pays you back in the currency that just failed you. You get another name out of the same pool, sold the same way, and the clock starts again.

There is also the matter of what you were told you were buying. The Federal Trade Commission approved a final order against HomeAdvisor in April 2023 over how it marketed its leads to home improvement businesses, and HomeAdvisor now trades as Angi Leads. I am not telling you nobody makes that work, because plenty of shops still do. I am telling you the gap between what a lead is sold as and what it turns out to be is old news in this trade, and the credit queue is where that gap gets absorbed.

So when you price a bad lead, price the drive, the estimator hour and the office time spent chasing the credit. What the vendor charged is the smallest line in it.

Anyone can print the word exclusive on a page. The check that cannot be faked is the account: ask whose ad account the homeowner came from, and ask whether you can log into it yourself. A homeowner who filled in a form inside your own account is not sitting in anybody’s inventory, so there is nothing to resell him out of.

The second check is the unit you pay for. When you are charged the moment a form arrives, the person selling it carries no risk after that minute. When you are charged for a qualified inspection that happened, he carries it all the way to your doorstep. That difference shows up on your calendar inside a month.