How to Get Deck Building Leads That Sign in February, Not May

A shared deck builder lead costs less up front, but it's sold to 3 to 4 contractors. An exclusive lead costs more, and no other builder is calling the same homeowner.

We couldn't find a deck-specific lead price published anywhere. Angi's contractor site names a "Deck or Porch - Repair" task with no price beside it, and Thumbtack and Modernize post no number either.

So the prices below are platform-wide rates or contractor reports, and each one says which.

• Angi, shared: one contractor puts his average at about $60 a lead, with a $45 to $122 range, trade not stated.
• Networx, both: its own help page lists $10 to $100+ per lead shared and $15 to $120+ exclusive.
• Your own Meta ads, exclusive: $76.55 a lead on Bit House Digital's deck builder account, for $15,000 to $40,000 composite decks.

Which one is cheaper, then?

Per lead, the shared one. A $76.55 lead reads expensive next to the $40 door-replacement leads one deck builder reports from Angi, and cheap next to the $25,096 Zonda puts on a typical composite deck.

Across eight trades and $139,167 of managed spend, Bit House Digital's cost per lead ran from $29.45 to $119.18, 2,635 leads in total. A deck lead sits mid-range because the ticket sets the number.

The bigger difference is what you keep. A shared lead is rented: stop paying and the leads stop, and you weren't the only builder calling anyway.

Your own ads build an asset. The deck footage, the audience your ad account learns from your leads, and the landing page that asks the material question keep working season after season.

And the lead is yours alone.

Buying deck leads mostly means buying from Angi. HomeAdvisor now sells its leads as Angi Leads, CraftJack redirects to Angi's pro signup, and Networx posts its own prices.

Angi's own site says a lead goes to 3 to 4 contractors. Deck builders on Reddit describe what that's like.

One builder keeps his Angi leads paused. The leads that get through are dead numbers or homeowners ten contractors already called, and if he doesn't call within 20 seconds, the job is gone.

Another asked how anyone gets deck leads now, because "Thumbtack isn't what it used to be."

HomeAdvisor doesn't come up at all: zero mentions across 23,000 r/Decks comments we read.

A deck builder did report HomeAdvisor deck-build leads at $50 to $88 each back in 2017, with "no guarantee of meeting the home owner."

Networx's own help page lists $10 to $100+ per shared lead and $15 to $120+ exclusive.

Read the contract before you sign. Angi doesn't publish its contractor agreement, but contractors and third-party reviewers report these terms.

• A 12-month term
• 60 days' notice to cancel
• An early-exit penalty of 30 to 35% of the remaining contract value
• Bad leads credited back, not refunded in cash

The lead business has a history, too. The FTC ordered HomeAdvisor to pay $7.2 million over how it sold leads to contractors, and more than $3 million has gone back to contractors.

So when does buying them make sense?

If you're new, with no reviews and an empty March, one $15,000 deck from a shared lead pays for a year of them, as long as you call back within minutes.

Bottom line: buy shared leads to fill a gap, not to build a season.

The full bill and the point where the math flips are on our Angi page for deck builders. We score each vendor, agencies included, in our deck lead company comparison.

Generating your own deck leads on Facebook means running ads under your company's name that send homeowners to a landing page you control. No other contractor gets the lead.

The ad itself is simple. A deck needs no explaining, so footage of decks you built does the selling: before-and-after backyards, walk-throughs, and customers in their own words.

What does that ad look like?

The landing page does the second job. It asks material, size, and timeline before anyone drives out.

On Bit House Digital's deck builder account, leads ran $76.55 each for $15,000 to $40,000 composite decks. None of the leads behind these numbers came from Meta's native instant forms.

One builder on r/Decks described giving quote after quote to homeowners who insisted on Trex. He kept hearing "that's much more than we thought, never mind."

The top answer came from a builder who does almost all composite. Market yourself as a quality contractor and you get quality clients; market yourself on price and you get the budget clients.

The budget buyer is still a lead, just a different one, and she shouldn't cost you a Saturday. The full campaign build is in our guide to deck builder advertising on Meta.

Cost per signed deck job is what you spend on leads to sign one deck. On a $15,000 to $40,000 deck, the sources with a number behind them land between about $180 and $610.

Here's the formula in plain words:

Lead cost ÷ booking rate ÷ close rate. A lead that books half the time and closes a third of the time takes six leads per signed job.

The table runs that formula on each source, with the assumptions in plain view.

For scale, Qualified Remodeler's survey of 252 remodeling companies put the median cost per issued lead at $372 to $396.

That works out to roughly $1,900 to $2,500 per signed job at the one-in-five lead-to-contract rate Remodelers Advantage measured. It's a remodeling-industry figure, not a deck one.

Now hold the worst deck row up against the job. Zonda's Cost vs. Value report puts a contractor-built composite deck with matching rail, bench, and stairs at $25,096 nationally.

At that ticket, $610 is about 2.4% of the job to get the job. Against a $40,000 build, it's 1.5%.

If the ads bring back at least 2 to 3 times what you spend on them, you can run them profitably. Most of Bit House Digital's clients get back at least 5x.

Bottom line: on a deck ticket, the cheapest lead matters less than the lead that turns into a signed job without eating your estimating hours.

If you also build fences, we ran the same math on the smaller ticket in our fence leads breakdown.