Exclusive appointments vs shared leads.
Every roofing lead source sells you something different: a shared request racing four other trucks to the same door, or an appointment booked and confirmed for you alone. Here is how the shared-lead marketplaces actually work, the public record on what that costs contractors, a side-by-side of both models, and the honest case for when each one is the right buy.
One request, sold to multiple trucks.
Here is how the big marketplaces actually work. A homeowner fills out a form asking about a roof. That single request is then sold as a shared lead, meaning it goes out to multiple roofing contractors at once instead of to you alone. Every one of you paid to be one of the first calls, so the homeowner's phone rings more than once in the same afternoon from companies they never chose individually.
That turns the request into a race, not an appointment. You are not billed for a conversation. You are billed for a delivered lead, whether the homeowner answers or not, whether they are still interested by the time you reach them or not, and whether they were ever a real buyer or just comparing five quotes for a project they have not decided to do. Paying for a lead that never picks up is normal under this model, not a rare exception.
Multiply that by a full month of leads across your whole team, and you are funding a system that is built, by design, to sell the same piece of homeowner interest to your competitors at the same time it sells it to you.
Three data points, not opinions.
None of this proves every shared lead is worthless. It is simply the public record on the marketplace model that roofing contractors are opting into by default when they buy shared leads.
$7.2 million
In 2023 the FTC issued a final order requiring HomeAdvisor to pay up to $7.2 million over misleading claims about its lead quality, including how leads were sourced and whether homeowners were ready to hire.
$5,749.79
One contractor's BBB complaint against Angi: $5,749.79 in charges, with the contractor stating "I called every lead and not one person ever answered."
~1.4 / 5
Angi's Trustpilot rating sits around 1.4 out of 5 across more than 37,000 reviews, by industry estimates.
Shared leads vs exclusive appointments.
Same industry, two different products. Here is what each one actually sells you, row by row.
Marketplace and vendor figures above are competitors' published terms and public records, cited inline. See how our pricing works for the full billing model.
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Neither model is right for every roofer.
We sell exclusive appointments, and we still think the honest answer depends on your team.
When shared leads make sense
If you have a crew dedicated to fast, high-volume dialing and the appetite to work through a large share of unreachable or price-shopping contacts to find the handful that convert, shared leads can still work as a cheap top-of-funnel volume play. The per-unit price is lower than an exclusive booked appointment. That math only holds up if your team's calling time is close to free and you are optimizing purely for the lowest cost per contact, not for hours lost chasing dead numbers.
When exclusive appointments win
If your crew's time is your most expensive resource, if nobody on your team is dedicated to redialing a shared list of unreachable homeowners, or if you simply want your cost to track real completed estimates instead of raw contacts, exclusive booked appointments win. Shared roofing leads convert at roughly 13 to 20%, versus roughly 27 to 30% for exclusive leads, by industry estimates. No-shows are replaced free, so the cost you actually see is the cost of appointments that happen.
Shared leads vs appointments, answered.
Are shared roofing leads always a bad choice?
How many contractors get the same shared roofing lead?
What did the FTC find about HomeAdvisor's leads?
How is a VA Horizon appointment different from a shared lead?
What does an exclusive roofing appointment cost on the open market?
Stop racing for the same homeowner.
Book a 15-minute call. We map your service area and criteria, give you a per-appointment rate, and get you an exclusive calendar instead of a shared list.
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Commercial disclosure: VA Horizon authored this page and is a competing provider. No payment, affiliate commission, or endorsement from the compared company is claimed. Favorable VA Horizon statements are first-party positioning, not independent proof.
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