How to Build a Plumber or Contractor Lead List for Your City: What Is Public, What It Costs, How to Check It

A local lead list of plumbers, electricians, HVAC or roofing contractors is built from three public sources, and the quality of the list is decided by how the three are joined, not by which vendor sells it. This is how we build ours, with the numbers from the six metros on sale so you can judge the method before you buy anything or build your own.

Source 1: the map data

Every business with a public listing has a name, a category, an address, usually a phone and often a website. We read the Overture Maps places release (the open map data behind several large consumer apps) for a metro and keep the home-services categories. This gives the business, trade, city, phone and website columns. It does not give you a person's name or an email.

Source 2: the state licence registry

Four of the states we cover publish a bulk register of licensed contractors with a named person on the record: Washington (L&I, the primary principal), Oregon (CCB, the responsible managing individual), Arizona (ROC, the qualifying party) and Colorado (DORA, for electrical and plumbing licences, without a principal's name). Nevada, Idaho and Utah publish no bulk file. Joining the registry to the map data by business name and city adds the owner on record, the licence date, expiry, type and number, which also tells you who is newly licensed and who is about to lapse.

Source 3: the company's own website

Where the registry gives no name, the About or Team page often does. We read each company's site, keep a name only when the page is clearly that company's (its own name or phone appears on the page), and record the page it came from. Published business emails come from the same read. We never buy, guess or scrape personal email addresses.

What the join produces

Two things to notice. Email is the scarce column everywhere: most small contractors publish a phone and a form, not an address, so a list that claims an email on every row is guessing. And the named-person share follows the registry: Washington, Oregon and Arizona lists carry owner names on most registry-matched rows; Colorado and Nevada rows carry only the names read from company sites.

How to check a list before you pay

1. Ask for real rows, unmasked. Call three phones; two should ring the business.
2. Open five websites from the list; the business name on the site should match the row.
3. Look up two licence numbers on the state registry's public search; the names should match.
4. Ask what happens to bad rows. Ours are replaced free within 30 days.

The 60-row sample (ten real rows from each of the six metros, nothing masked) is free for exactly this test.

The rules to read before you call or write

Business-to-business calling and email are regulated: the TCPA for calls and texts, the national Do Not Call registry (with its business-to-business exemptions), CAN-SPAM for commercial email, and state rules on top. Read them by name before you start, keep a suppression list, and put a real postal address and a working opt-out in every email. None of this is legal advice; it is the reading list.

Buying instead of building

Each metro list is $49 (Puget Sound, Portland & Vancouver, Spokane, Boise & Salt Lake City, Denver & the Front Range, Phoenix & Tucson, Las Vegas & Reno), all six are $149, and the Custom Business List builds any city and category we can reach in the map data in one business day. Every list is CSV and Excel with one sheet per trade, and the README names the source of every column.

By Addison Lopez, Workshop Media Co. The percentages are computed from the files on sale on the day this was published and move with each monthly refresh.