The lead you paid for three times

A roofer's phone rings at 9:14am. Homeowner, hail damage, wants an estimate. Great lead. He's there by noon.

So is another roofer. A third one calls the homeowner while he's on the roof.

All three paid for that lead. All three will see it in their dashboard as "1 lead — delivered." Two of them will mark it "lost to competitor" and be told that's a sales problem.

The homeowner, meanwhile, filled out one form.

“I'm not buying leads. I'm buying a lottery ticket with two other guys' names on it.”

This is the Black Box without the agency — the lead marketplace. Same three moves, stripped down to a per-lead price. And because there's no retainer and no contract, it feels safer. It isn't.

The math nobody shows you

Say you pay $85 per roofing lead and close one in four of the leads you actually reach. That sounds like $340 per job. That's the number the marketplace wants you to carry around.

Now put in what actually happens:

Three times the headline number. And the marketplace's report is accurate the whole way down: 60 leads delivered. It just never defines "lead" as "a person who can become your customer and not also someone else's."

Roofing is the extreme case because the ticket is large and storms create a rush. But the same table works for HVAC replacements, plumbing remodels, and — with different labels — for law firms buying "case leads" from a referral network.

What the FTC actually found

This isn't an opinion about the model. In 2023, one of the largest home-services lead marketplaces settled with the FTC for up to $7.2 million. The complaint, which is public, said the company told contractors its leads were from homeowners who were ready to hire, that the leads were "verified," and that they'd be delivered promptly — when many were none of those things. Some came from people who hadn't asked for a contractor at all. Some were hours or days old by the time a contractor paid for them.

The order required refunds and a change to how the company describes its leads. It did not change the business model. Nothing about the model is illegal. What the FTC objected to was the gap between what was sold and what was delivered — which is Move 2, the report saying what it wants you to see, in its purest form.

Read the complaint if you want to see your own dashboard described in legal language.

Rent, obscure, disappear — the per-lead version

Run the three moves from post #4 across a lead marketplace:

Move 1 — Rent. You don't own the lead. You don't own the homeowner's contact record, the form they filled out, or the phone number they called. Stop paying and your "pipeline" evaporates, because it was never yours. The marketplace owns the homeowner relationship; you're one of the bidders.

Move 2 — Obscure. "Lead" is defined by the seller. "Verified" means a phone number format check. The dashboard counts deliveries, not outcomes, and it never shows you how many other contractors got the same one.

Move 3 — Disappear. Bad lead? File a dispute. There's a window, there's a review, there's a queue. Some get credited. Meanwhile the next batch is already billed.

The speed trap

Here's the part that makes resold leads worse than they look: when the same homeowner goes to three contractors, the job usually goes to whoever calls first. Not the best. The first.

That turns the marketplace into a race, and the race is run against the clock from the moment the form is submitted. A contractor on a roof with his phone in the truck loses every race that comes in for the next two hours — and pays for every entry.

Speed-to-lead is the subject of the next post, because it matters everywhere. But it matters most here, where you've paid for the right to be one of three people sprinting toward the same phone.

"But we get jobs from it"

You probably do. Resold leads aren't fake. Five jobs in the table above are real jobs.

The question isn't whether it works. It's whether $1,020 per job is a good number — and whether you'd know if it weren't, since the report says $85.

For some contractors, at some times of year, $1,020 per job on a $14,000 roof is fine. For a $400 repair it's ruinous. The marketplace doesn't split the two. You have to.

Three questions before the next invoice

1. "How many other contractors received this lead?" If the answer isn't a number, assume three.
2. "What's my cost per job — not per lead?" Pull last month's leads, mark which became jobs, divide. Ten minutes.
3. "If I stopped buying tomorrow, what would I have?" If the answer is "nothing," you were renting a phone number.

If you want the same math run against your own channels — marketplace, Google, Meta, LSA — the Leak Check does it in three questions and shows you where the money is actually going. No email for the score.

Run the Leak Check

What to buy instead

Leads you own come from assets you own: your Business Profile, your LSA account in your own name, search ads in your own account, a site on your own domain. They cost money to build and they're yours when you stop. That's the difference between buying a lead and building a source of them.

It's not a reason to quit the marketplace tomorrow — storm season is storm season. It's a reason to know what each lead really costs, and to put the next dollar into something that's still there next year.