When you buy construction leads, you're usually buying one of three things: a homeowner's request passed along by a lead service, access to a bid board, or research built from public records. They work differently, and the difference decides how many of your calls turn into work.
| Shared lead services | Bid boards and project databases | Morningline permit research | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Where projects come from | People who fill out a request form | Projects posted for bidding, mostly larger commercial work | Every building permit filed or issued in your area |
| Who else gets it | Often sent to several contractors | Every subscriber who searches for it | One company per trade in each area |
| What you get | A name and a phone number | Bid documents and a deadline | The project, its stage and value, who is building it, with contacts |
| How you use it | Race to call first | Search, download, bid | Open the morning report and work the call list |
| Kinds of projects | Mostly small residential jobs | Mostly public and large private bids | New homes and buildings, build-outs, remodels and demolitions |
Shared lead services
A lead service collects requests from people who need work done and sells each request to contractors, often to several at once. You pay per lead, and the first company to call usually wins. These leads are mostly homeowners with small residential jobs, and many never become a project.
Bid boards and project databases
Bid boards list projects that are open for bids, mostly public work and large private projects. They are built for estimators: you search, download plans and submit a price before a deadline. Smaller private projects, which are most of the work in any city, rarely appear there.
Permit research
A building permit is filed when a project is real: someone has plans, a budget and usually a builder. Permits are public, but reading them yourself means checking each city's records every day, sorting out the work that matters to your trade and finding who is behind each one. Morningline does that work. Every weekday morning you get the new permits in your area that fit your trade, ranked, with the builder or owner and their contacts. We read 39,232 permits a month across the cities we cover, and only one company per trade in each area gets the list.
Which one fits
If you want homeowner calls for small jobs, a lead service sells exactly that. If you bid public and large commercial work, a bid board is built for it. If you want to know about the projects in your area early, from new homes to tenant build-outs, and call the people running them before they've picked their subs and suppliers, that's permit research.
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