Key takeaways
- 1A comparison site sells one enquiry to several firms, so you are buying a place in a queue rather than a client.
- 2Shared leads are quick to switch on and need no build. That convenience is real, and it is what you are paying for.
- 3Your own pipeline costs more to start and less to run, because nothing is shared and nothing stops working when you stop paying a third party.
- 4The honest answer for most firms is both for a while: keep the shared leads running while the owned pipeline is built, then let the numbers decide.
Every firm in the built environment has had the same conversation. Someone signs up to a lead portal, the enquiries arrive, and for a month or two it feels like a solved problem. Then the win rate gets examined and the mood changes.
This is not an argument that comparison sites are a scam. They are a real channel with real advantages. It is an argument that they are a different product from an owned pipeline, and that firms routinely compare the two on the wrong number.
What you are actually buying
A lead portal sells access to intent it has already captured. Someone searched, landed on the portal’s page rather than yours, filled in one generic form, and that single enquiry is then sold on. Often to you and several competitors at once.
So three things are true at the same time:
- It works immediately. No build, no campaigns, no tracking setup. Enquiries can be arriving this week.
- You are one of several. The homeowner did not choose you. They filled in a form and are now fielding call-backs.
- You are renting, not owning. Stop paying and the enquiries stop the same day. Nothing accumulates.
That first point is worth real money, and it is why portals exist. The mistake is treating a shared enquiry and an exclusive one as the same unit when you compare prices.
The number the comparison hides
Cost per lead is the figure on the invoice. Cost per won job is the figure your business runs on, and the gap between them is your conversion rate.
Divide what you pay by the jobs you actually win, not the enquiries you receive. A shared lead that looks half the price of an exclusive one has to convert at least half as well to break even. In practice, when four firms are racing to the same phone number, it often does not.
Nobody loses work to a better surveyor. They lose it to a faster one.
The second cost is quieter and it lands on your team. Eleven unsuccessful call-backs is a morning gone. That time does not appear on any invoice, but it is the most expensive thing in the whole exercise.
Work out your own numbers
Tell us your fees, your patch and the work you want more of. We'll come back with a plan, not a pitch.
What owning the pipeline actually involves
An owned pipeline is not just “run some ads”. It is four things built together:
- Pages for the work you want. One page per service, written for one type of buyer, so the enquiry arrives already half-qualified.
- Campaigns pointed at them. Search for people actively looking, plus social where the buying cycle starts earlier.
- Tracking that survives the handover. Every enquiry traced back to the search, ad and page that produced it.
- Forms that do the filtering. Scope, location, budget and timing asked up front, so you price the right jobs first.
The trade-off is honest: this takes weeks rather than days, and the first month is a build rather than a return. What you get at the end is an asset in your own accounts that keeps working, gets cheaper per job as it is optimised, and sends every enquiry to exactly one firm.
So which one
For most firms the answer is not either. It is both, in sequence.
Keep the portal running while the owned pipeline is built, so nothing goes quiet during the changeover. Track both properly, on cost per won job rather than cost per lead. Then, after three months of real data, let the numbers make the decision for you. Some firms turn the portals off entirely. Others keep a trickle running to fill quiet weeks, which is a perfectly sensible place to land.
What matters is that you are choosing on evidence from your own account, rather than on the headline price of a shared enquiry.
