Remodeling Leads: Win the Homeowner Before the Estimate

By the time a homeowner fills out your form for a bathroom remodel, they've done a lot of reading. They've saved pictures, argued about tile and, more than anything, tried to find out what it's going to cost. Google's Keyword Planner counts about 40,500 US searches a month for “bathroom remodel cost” and 27,100 for “kitchen remodel cost”.

That changes what a remodeling lead is. It's the middle of a long purchase, not the start of the sale, and most of the first half happened before you knew the homeowner existed. Whoever was useful during that first half (usually by answering the cost question straight) has a head start when the homeowner finally picks up the phone.

This piece is about that first half. It's also about why a kitchen, a bathroom and a whole-home remodel are three different sales that happen to share a trade.

Where the lead sits in the purchase

Whatever the room, a remodeling project tends to move through the same stages:

1. 1A reason. A leak, a dated kitchen before a sale, a parent moving in, a family that's outgrown the house.
2. 2The budget question. “What does this cost, and can we afford it?”
3. 3Ideas. Pictures, showrooms, a few products picked out.
4. 4A shortlist. A handful of names from reviews, friends and near-me searches.
5. 5Estimates and a decision. This is where your lead shows up, well into the story.

The searches change at each stage, and Keyword Planner shows how much of the traffic sits before the shortlist.

Look at the cost searches first. They are big next to the near-me searches. For bathrooms the cost search is a bit under half the size of the near-me search, and for kitchens it is about 30 percent. Those people aren't ready to call anyone yet. They want a number.

Then notice that the bigger the project, the smaller the search. Whole-house remodels and design-build firms get searched far less than single rooms. My guess is that fewer households take them on, and the ones that do ask friends, designers and architects before they ask Google.

Answer the cost question before anyone asks you

Lots of remodelers keep prices off their website, and I understand why. Every job is different, a number on a page gets quoted back at you, and a competitor can undercut it. But the homeowner is going to find a number somewhere. If it isn't yours, it'll be a national figure from a site that's never seen their house, and you'll spend the first meeting arguing with it.

A cost page that brings in leads doesn't need a single price. It has to be honest, and specific to your area and your work.

• Ranges from your own finished jobs. A basic bathroom refresh, a mid-range remodel, a full gut with layout changes, each with the range you invoiced recently.
• What moves the number. Relocated plumbing, structural changes, custom cabinets, tile choices, permits, and whatever's hiding behind an old wall.
• Three real projects. Photos, the scope in a paragraph, and what it cost, with the client's permission.
• What's not included. Appliances, design fees, a temporary kitchen, whatever homeowners in your area tend to forget.
• How long it takes. From signed contract to finished room, including the wait for cabinets or fixtures.

That page does two jobs. It pulls in people searching for cost, and it filters them. A homeowner who reads your ranges and still calls has already accepted that the job costs roughly what you charge, and no lead does anything more useful than that before the first meeting.

Kitchen, bath and whole-home are three different sales

You can see the difference in temperament in the search data too. Both near-me searches average about 90,500 a month, but they don't move the same way through the year.

The kitchen search went from 40,500 in November to 135,000 in August, more than three times as many. The bathroom search never dropped below 60,500 or rose above 110,000, a swing of less than double. Both dipped in November. I'd guess few people want a kitchen torn out with the holidays coming, though the data doesn't say why.

Bathrooms: the urgent one

A bathroom is often the most urgent of the three. Something leaks, the tub isn't safe anymore for an older parent, or the house is about to go on the market. The steadier search line fits that, since bathrooms need fixing in every season.

The job tends to go to the remodeler who shows up, looks competent and gives a clear range fast. Photos of finished bathrooms matter. So do photos of a clean, protected job site, because the homeowner is going to live next to it for weeks.

Kitchens: the planned one

A kitchen is a bigger decision, usually made by more than one person and planned for longer. Kitchen buyers often need to see the design before they believe the price, so a design meeting as the first step suits this sale. Drawings and a range turn a cold estimate into a room the household has started to picture, and the remodeler who drew it is the natural one to build it.

Whole home and additions: the referred one

Whole-home remodels and additions are fewer and bigger. “Home addition contractors” draws about 22,200 searches a month, “whole house remodel” 6,600 and “design build firm” 4,400. Those are small numbers next to the single rooms, for the biggest purchase of the three, and there's often a lender, an architect or a designer involved.

With these jobs the lead is more likely to come as an introduction than as a form. What wins is a finished project of a similar size, a reference who'll take a call, and a written description of how you run a long job (who the homeowner talks to, how changes get priced, how often they hear from you). If you also bid commercial work, that is a separate market with its own rules, covered in contractor leads from homeowners and bid boards.

What advertisers bid on the room searches

Keyword Planner gives each search a top-of-page bid range, with a low end and a high end. Neither number is a click price, and neither is what you'd pay. What the range does show is how crowded each auction is.

About as many homeowners look for a bathroom remodeler near them as for a kitchen one, yet the low end of the bathroom range is more than three times the kitchen figure. My read is that bathroom jobs are smaller and quicker to sell, so more remodelers chase them and the auction gets tighter.

The bottom three rows are what lead sellers and agencies bid to reach you when you search for leads. For both rooms, the low end of that bid sits above the low end of the bid to reach the homeowner. So whoever sells you a bathroom lead has to earn back the cost of finding you on top of the cost of finding the homeowner.

A lead that says “just getting prices” is not dead

Because the lead arrives in the middle of the purchase, plenty of homeowners aren't ready when they first call. They're checking that the budget is real, or comparing your range with one they read somewhere. Drop them after one unanswered follow-up and you've thrown away the part of the pipeline that cost the most to build.

It also means a remodeling channel judged after one month looks worse than it is. Some invented numbers to show it, not benchmarks. A remodeler spends $8,000 in a quarter and gets 40 leads. Four sign within 30 days, so the channel looks like $2,000 per signed job. Over the next six months, with steady follow-up, four more of those same leads sign. The same $8,000 has now bought eight jobs, at $1,000 each.

• Ask when they want the work done, write it down, and follow up then, not on some fixed weekly schedule.
• Send something useful instead of a reminder. A finished project like theirs, a note on how long cabinets are taking, the cost page with a line about what's changed.
• Keep the source attached to the lead, so a job signed in month five still counts for the channel that brought it in.
• When you lose, ask why. Price, timing and trust each need a different fix, and you can't tell them apart without asking.

How to get remodeling leads that are ready to talk

1. 1Publish your cost ranges for each room you want more of, built from your own invoices.
2. 2Give kitchens, bathrooms and whole-home work their own pages, each with finished projects and the worries that buyer brings.
3. 3Ask for reviews that name the room, so the next bathroom client reads about a bathroom.
4. 4Run search ads on the near-me searches for the rooms you want. Track calls and forms from day one, and send each search to the page for that room. The Google Ads for contractors guide covers how to build it.
5. 5Treat designers, architects and realtors as a channel for the larger projects, and give each one its own line in your records.
6. 6Go carefully with marketplaces. Angi, HomeAdvisor, Thumbtack and Houzz sell homeowner requests to pros, and on the big ones a request commonly goes to several pros at once. In a slow sale built on trust, a request shared with competitors puts you behind from the start.
7. 7Follow up for months, and measure over months. The channel that looks expensive in the first 30 days might be the one that fills next spring.

None of this is quick. Remodeling is a slow purchase, and the cheapest leads you'll get are the ones you started earning long before the homeowner called.