A shared lead is one homeowner inquiry sold to multiple contractors at once — each pays full price, only one can win the job, and often none do. The model multiplies platform revenue per inquiry while multiplying contractor acquisition costs, and it rewards the fastest dialer rather than the best tradesman.
The single most misunderstood mechanic in contractor marketing: when you buy a "lead," you're usually not buying a customer. You're buying an entry ticket to a footrace.
The mechanics
A homeowner fills out a form: panel keeps tripping, Burke VA. The platform sells that inquiry — the same one — to several contractors in the area. Each pays the full lead price. The homeowner, who expected "a" contractor, gets four phone calls in ten minutes and picks whoever caught them live (or gets spooked and answers nobody).
Follow the money
One $80 inquiry sold four ways is $320 of revenue for the platform — per inquiry, regardless of outcome. Now flip to your side of the table: at best one of the four of you books it, meaning the group's combined acquisition cost for that single job was $320 plus four contractors' quoting time. The other three paid for nothing, and the winner often won by discounting against three visible competitors.
What it selects for
- Speed over skill. The job goes to whoever answers first — which punishes the electrician who was, inconveniently, doing electrical work when the lead dropped.
- Discounting. Four bidders on every job drags prices toward the floor. Great for homeowners, brutal for margins, invisible on the platform's invoice.
- Admin bloat. The solo who buys shared leads needs to be a full-time dispatcher between jobs. That's a second job that pays negative wages.
The structural alternative
The problem isn't that platforms are evil; it's that their unit of sale is the inquiry, so their incentives stop at maximizing inquiries sold. A job network's unit is the completed job — one job, one contractor, one fixed payout, no race. When you're offered work by Loadside, nobody else was offered it; accept it and it's simply yours.
Full cost math, including the race tax: The True Cost of Buying Leads.