The True Cost of Shared Leads

Almost every trade contractor has tried a lead marketplace at some point. The pitch is seductive: pay per lead, leads show up in your inbox, no sales effort required. And almost every trade contractor has the same story about how it went. Builtie takes a different route: it does not sell inquiries, it finds builders from public permits and runs the outreach to them in the contractor's own name.

The lead arrives. You call within ten minutes, because you know the game. The homeowner is surprised you called at all, mentions three other contractors already reached out, and is mostly price shopping a job they may never actually do. You quote it anyway. Silence. Repeat forty times a month, at $40 to $150 per lead, and you have a marketing bill with nothing to show for it except a lower opinion of humanity.

Why the model is broken for trades

The economics of shared-lead marketplaces work against you by design. The platform gets paid when it sells the lead, not when you win the job, so the same inquiry is sold to multiple contractors and the incentive is volume over quality. You are not buying an opportunity. You are buying a ticket to a price war with four competitors, for a consumer project with no verified budget or timeline.

There is a second, quieter cost. Chasing dozens of low-intent consumer leads consumes the exact hours you should be spending building relationships with builders and developers who award work repeatedly, not once.

What a qualified project lead actually looks like

Flip every attribute of a shared lead and you get something different in kind, not just in degree. A real construction opportunity: an active development, not a maybe-someday inquiry. A verified company behind it: a builder, developer, or owner with a track record you can see. A named decision maker with contact details, not a form fill. Context: what is being built, where, at what scale, and why your trade is relevant right now. And exclusivity of effort: outreach you initiate, on your positioning, rather than a bidding scrum.

One relationship with a builder who does eight projects a year is worth more than a hundred one-shot consumer leads. The math is not close.

How Builtie fits

Builtie was built as the opposite of the marketplace model. We do not sell you inquiries. Our engine monitors construction activity across the GTA, identifies the projects that match your trade and ideal profile, and delivers qualified leads: the project, the company behind it, the decision maker, and what to say. You reach out directly, early, before it becomes a bidding war.

You stop paying to compete for scraps and start systematically building the builder relationships that compound.

Know the projects. Reach the decision makers. Upgrade your pipeline at builtie.com.