The call always turns at the same point. Four or five minutes in, once the rep has established that you are tired of racing three other contractors to the same homeowner, they say the word “exclusive,” and the price jumps. Ask what it means and you get an answer that sounds like a guarantee and behaves like a preference.
“Exclusive” is a sales word. It has no fixed meaning in a lead contract unless somebody writes one in, and the vendors who use it hardest are the ones who have written the least of it down. Before you pay a premium for exclusive leads for contractors, make them define four things, then price the result against your own close rate rather than against the sticker.
Four things the word can mean, and one of them is what you heard
Exclusive can mean exclusive for a window. You get the lead first, alone, for sixty minutes or four hours, after which it goes to everyone else on the list. Nothing in that arrangement is a lie. It is also not what a contractor hears when the word is said out loud.
It can mean exclusive within a geography. One contractor per zip code, or per county, or per some unit the vendor draws. Ask how many other contractors hold the neighboring units and whether the homeowner’s address decides the assignment or the phone’s area code does, because in a metro like Atlanta a zip code is about a fifteen-minute drive and your exclusive territory is surrounded by people bidding on the same job.
It can mean exclusive by category. You are the only roofer, and the vendor is also selling the same homeowner to a gutter company and a general remodeler, both of whom will happily quote the roof while they are on site.
And it can mean exclusive until it is resold. The lead comes to you alone in week one, and in week five it goes into an aged list that gets sold by the thousand to whoever wants it. You bought a head start. The vendor sold the same record twice and both statements about it were true.
The four definitions that belong in the contract
Get these written into the agreement or the word is decoration.
- The window, stated in minutes or hours, during which no other contractor receives the lead, and what happens at the end of it.
- The unit of geography, named precisely, along with the number of other contractors holding adjacent units in your trade.
- The resale terms, meaning whether the record is ever resold, rented, licensed, or bundled into an aged list, and after how long.
- The credit policy, which should cover a disconnected number, an address outside your service area, and a homeowner asking for a trade you do not perform.
If a vendor will not put the resale terms in writing, the answer is yes, they resell. Treat the refusal as a disclosure and end the call there. The same goes for a rep who says exclusivity is “standard practice” or “how the whole industry does it” without producing a clause, because a clause takes thirty seconds to email and a deflection takes a paragraph.
We wrote the wider version of this sorting exercise, covering the different kinds of company that all sell something called a lead, in lead generation companies for contractors, and the buy-or-skip math on the biggest marketplace in are Angi leads worth it.
The premium is only worth what your close rate says
Here is the comparison run with the assumptions on the table, and it does not come out where the vendor wants it to.
Say a general home services shop is offered shared leads at $25, each sold to four contractors, and exclusive leads from the same vendor at $80. Assume you close 12% of the shared ones, because three other people are calling the same homeowner, and 30% of the exclusives, because you are the only voice. Those assumptions are the whole result, so use your own if you have thirty leads of history to draw them from.
At $25 and a 12% close, a booked job costs you $208 in lead fees. At $80 and a 30% close, the same booked job costs $267. The shared lead wins by $59 a job, and it wins at every volume, which is not the answer anyone selling exclusivity has in their deck.
Now the formula that makes this portable. Divide your exclusive close rate by your shared close rate and multiply by the shared price. That is the most the exclusive lead can cost before it loses. Thirty percent over twelve percent is 2.5, times $25, which gives $62.50. At $80 the vendor is asking for $17.50 more than the exclusivity is worth to you.
The number that flips it is dilution. If the shared lead is going to six contractors instead of four and your close rate on it drops to 8%, the shared booked job now costs $312 and the exclusive at $267 becomes the better buy. So the question to press the vendor on is not the price of the exclusive lead. It is how many contractors receive the shared one, and that is the figure they are slowest to give you.
Our published band for general home services puts an inquiry between $25 and $80 with a typical close rate near 35%, which you can see on the home services lead cost page. That 35% describes people who came looking for you through your own listing or your own ads. Nobody should expect it from a bought lead, exclusive or otherwise, and a vendor quoting your industry’s average close rate back at you is quoting a number their product does not produce.
What one costs if you make it yourself
Across US search advertising, the average cost of a single lead is $66.69 1. That figure is the reference point every exclusive lead price should be held against, because a lead you generate from your own ad, on your own phone number, is exclusive by construction and nobody has to define the word for you.
It is not free, obviously. There is a management fee, and a few months before a new account settles down. But when a broker quotes $150 for an exclusive roofing lead, they are quoting more than double the national average cost of producing one, and the gap is their margin plus the cost of you not having to think about it. Sometimes that is a reasonable trade, particularly with an empty schedule and a crew on payroll this week.
Where it stops being reasonable is year three, still paying a per-lead price that has never dropped, on a phone number you do not own. That is the position most of the contractors who arrive at our Atlanta home and auto services practice are in when they call, and unwinding it takes a quarter.
Run the multiplier on your own last thirty leads before the next renewal. If you cannot fill in your shared close rate because nobody tracked which leads came from where, that missing number is costing you more than the exclusivity premium ever did, and what would it take to have it by next month?