Buying electrician leads is renting customers you already earned

By Stacey Tallitsch | October 12, 2026

The charge hits your card on the first of the month the same way the power bill does. A few hundred dollars, sometimes more, to Angi or HomeAdvisor or whatever lead company cold-called you back in the spring. In exchange, your phone buzzes with names. A panel that keeps tripping. A hot tub that needs its own circuit. An EV charger somebody wants in the garage by Friday. You call the first name back and the man says he already booked another electrician. The second goes to voicemail. The third wants three quotes and will take whoever is cheapest. You burn an afternoon chasing people who were never really yours, and next month the card gets charged again.

Here is the thing nobody selling you those leads will say out loud. You are not buying customers. You are renting them. And the rent only goes up.

The lead you bought was already looking for you

Think about where that name came from. A homeowner three miles from your shop typed "electrician near me" into a phone because a breaker won't reset. That person was going to hire an electrician this week no matter what anyone did. They were already in your area, already ready, already yours to win. The aggregator did not create that customer. It stepped into the gap between you and a customer who was walking toward you anyway, and charged you a toll to get past.

That is the entire business, and it is worth saying plainly: the aggregator's product is not leads. Its product is the space between a ready homeowner and the electricians who want the work. The more electricians it signs up in your town, the more valuable that space becomes — to the aggregator. It sells the same panel-upgrade lead to you and to three or four other shops at the same time. You are not competing for a customer. You are competing in an auction the house set up, and the house gets paid every round whether you book the job or not.

This is not marketing. It is rent. And like any rent, it buys you nothing you keep. The day you stop paying, the names stop. You do not own a list, a reputation, or one square foot of ground at the top of the search. You own a canceled subscription and the same quiet phone you had before you started.

It gets worse, because you may not even be renting what you think. In March of 2022 the Federal Trade Commission filed a complaint against HomeAdvisor — the company that also owns Angi — alleging it sold leads to contractors and small businesses using false or unsubstantiated claims. HomeAdvisor told pros the leads matched their trade and their service area and came from homeowners ready to hire soon. The FTC alleged that many did not match, were not ready, and had in fact been bought from other websites rather than coming from anyone who sought out HomeAdvisor at all. Set aside how that case lands. The allegation by itself tells you what the thing you are renting really is: a name on a list, sold to you and several of your competitors, that may not be in your town, may not want an electrician, and may not be hiring anyone this month.

Run the number nobody runs

Most electricians never do the arithmetic that would end this argument in one afternoon, because the monthly charge is small enough to ignore and the leads keep the phone from going silent. Silence is scary. A buzzing phone feels like proof the money is working. It is not proof. It is noise you are paying for.

So run the real number. Not cost per lead — cost per job you actually booked and got paid for. If you spend $400 in a month and that produces 2 paying jobs out of 20 names, your cost is $200 a job, not the $20 a lead the rep quoted you. Now set that beside the jobs that come from a customer typing your name, or a neighbor's referral, or your own listing showing up first when someone searches your trade and your town. Those jobs cost you nothing per call and they stack on each other. The aggregator job costs you every single time and stacks up for somebody else.

One of these is a liability you re-lease every month. The other is an asset you build once and keep. A homeowner who found you directly, liked the work, and left a five-star review is not a lead. He is a piece of ground you now hold at the top of the map, and he brings the next homeowner along with him for free. If your phone rings plenty but the work is all small — service calls, a receptacle here, a dimmer there, never the panel upgrades and service changes that actually pay — bought leads will not fix that either. They hand you whatever the auction happened to catch, which is mostly the cheapest, smallest work in the pile.

Here is the part that should sting, and it is the real reason to walk away. Every dollar you hand the aggregator does not just fail to build your position. It funds the thing standing in your way. Those companies take the fees they collect from you and your competitors and spend them to own the top of the results for "electrician near me" in your own town — the exact spot your own business should hold for free. You are paying the landlord to make the building taller and the rent higher. The longer you stay, the harder it gets to be found without them, which is the whole point. A customer who was yours to win for nothing becomes a customer you can only reach by paying. That is not a service. It is a tollbooth you helped build on your own road.

I am not telling you to shut the leads off tonight if they are the only thing feeding the crew this week. If you are three months into opening your doors and nobody in town knows your name yet, renting a few leads to keep the lights on is a defensible bridge. But it is a bridge, not a foundation. The real question is whether you are using the months those leads buy you to build something you own — or just paying the rent and calling it a plan. If you are not sure the paid work is even necessary yet, that is worth settling before the next invoice, and I made the case for checking the free levers first already.

Do this today

Before anything else, pull your account and count. Take the last 30 days of leads you paid for. How many turned into a job you actually invoiced? Divide what you spent by that number. Write the figure down somewhere you will see it — that is your true cost per job, and it is almost always three or four times what you assumed when you signed up.

Then pick up your phone, open a private browser window so your own history doesn't color the results, and search your trade and your town the way a homeowner would: "electrician," then your town. Look at what shows up first. Is it you? Is your Google Business Profile even there, filled in, showing the panel work and the EV installs you want, with recent reviews under it? The distance between that cost-per-job number and that empty spot at the top of the map is the entire case. You do not have to decide anything today. You just have to look at both numbers honestly. Most electricians never do.

— Stacey Tallitsch, Stronghold CMO

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About the Author

Stacey Tallitsch builds marketing and answering systems for home-services and trades businesses at Stronghold CMO, part of Talisman Capital, Inc. He is a 30-year technology veteran and the author of 21 books, with more than 30,000 students across his course catalog.

• LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/stacey-tallitsch-729b6336a
• Books on Amazon: amazon.com/author/staceytallitsch
• Courses on Udemy: udemy.com/user/stacey-tallitsch

Quick reference

Are Angi and HomeAdvisor leads worth it for electricians? Rarely, once you count correctly. Divide what you pay in a month by the jobs you actually booked, not the leads you received. Most electricians find their true cost per job is three or four times what the rep quoted, because the same lead was sold to several shops at once and many callers were only price-shopping.

Why do other electricians get the same lead I paid for? Because that is the product. Aggregators sell a single lead to multiple contractors at the same time, so you are bidding against three or four other shops for work the homeowner was already searching for. The platform gets paid whether or not you win the job.

What should I do instead of buying leads? Build what you keep. Claim and complete your Google Business Profile, set the right primary category, ask every satisfied customer for a review, and make sure you show up when someone searches your trade and your town. Those customers cost nothing per call and compound over time, which a bought lead never does.