Bought roofing leads run $75-$250 each and go to 3-4 contractors. Owned rankings cost a fixed monthly fee and get cheaper per lead every month.
Short answer: bought roofing leads run $75 to $250+ per lead in 2026, and most are shared with 3-4 other contractors. Exclusive leads from brokers run $150 to $400+. Storm-season surge pricing goes higher.
What each channel actually costs
Shared lead platforms (Angi, Networx, 33 Mile Radius types): $75-$250 per lead. The same homeowner is sold to several roofers within minutes, so your close rate is a bidding war. Effective cost per booked job often lands at $500-$1,500.
You can rent leads forever, or spend the same money once and own the ranking.
Exclusive lead brokers: $150-$400+ per lead. Better close rates, but you still own nothing: stop paying and the pipeline stops same day.
Google Ads: roofing clicks cost $15-$45; "roofing leads" keywords themselves bid around $41. With a typical landing page converting 5-10%, that is $150-$600 per lead you generated yourself.
Organic rankings: a fixed monthly investment, but the output compounds. The same "roof repair [city]" ranking produces calls every month with no per-lead fee, which is why mature roofing companies treat rankings as an asset, not a channel.
The math that decides it
Say a roofing SEO program costs $1,500/month and after month 4 produces 25 exclusive calls monthly. That is $60 per exclusive lead trending down every month as rankings climb. The same 25 leads bought shared at $150 cost $3,750, forever, and they are not exclusive.
The crossover usually lands between month 3 and month 6. After that, bought leads never catch up.
Why exclusive beats shared even at the same price
A shared lead calls you after the broker rang three competitors. An organic lead found you, read your reviews, and chose you before dialing. Close rates reflect that: owned-ranking leads regularly close at 2-3x shared-lead rates, so the per-job math is even more lopsided than per-lead.
How to move from renting to owning
The sequence we run: win the map pack for your service area, build service and city pages for repair and replacement searches, run a review engine, and keep Local Services Ads as a storm-season layer only. Full breakdown on our roofing marketing page, and the rankings engine on roofing SEO.
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