I Want To Buy Home Improvement Leads

Scraping this niche was a nightmare because most of the data sits behind lead gen paywalls or is stale from aggregators. We cracked the code by hitting county permit databases, property tax records, and a few public contractor registration lists. Took us 6 months to get the deduplication right, but now we have a clean list of homeowners who've recently pulled permits for renovations, roofing, or additions. If you want leads that aren't recycled garbage, this is it.

We initially tried scraping Yelp and Google Maps for contractors, but that gave us the contractors, not the homeowners. So we pivoted to public records. The trick was matching permit data with property owner info from tax assessor sites. We had to build custom parsers for each county because their formats are all over the place. After a lot of trial and error, we now deliver a CSV with the homeowner's name, address, permit type, and date. It's raw, but it's real.

The hardest part was filtering out commercial properties and multi-unit buildings. We only want single-family homes with active permits. We also had to deal with data gaps—some counties don't publish permit details online. We filled those gaps with utility connection data and property value changes. The result is a dataset that's as close to real-time as possible, updated monthly. It's not perfect, but it's the best you'll get without paying $50 per lead.