For builders, leads are cheap and quotes are expensive

Every other trade in this series has the same argument at its centre: what does a won job actually cost you, once you count the enquiries that went nowhere? For roofers and plumbers, that sum turns on the lead fee, because plenty of their jobs are small enough for £30 to matter.

Building work doesn't work like that. A single-storey extension runs £36,000–£50,000 for a 20m² build and £55,000–£75,000 at 30m². Against that, a £30 enquiry is nothing — you could buy a hundred and still be ahead if one landed.

So the fee isn't the question. The question is what it costs you to chase the ones that don't land.

Where the work comes from

Architects, structural engineers and planning consultants. The most valuable relationships in the trade, because they meet the project months before the homeowner starts ringing builders. By the time an extension reaches a lead platform, the drawings exist and three builders are being asked to price them. The architect knew about it last spring. These referrals also arrive pre-qualified — somebody has already spent the client's money on drawings, which answers the budget question before you ask it.

Past customers and their neighbours. Extensions are visible. The skip, the scaffold and the finished side return are all advertising to a street of people who've been thinking about the same thing. Being visibly tidy on site is a lead source, which is not true of most trades.

The FMB register. Membership of the Federation of Master Builders costs £62.69 + VAT a month, plus a first-year inspection fee, and includes a profile on its Find a Builder directory — which the FMB says draws over 20,000 consumer visits a month. Joining means trading-history, credit and insurance checks and a site inspection.

That vetting is the product. A homeowner about to spend fifty grand with a stranger is looking for a reason to trust one of three names, and a credential they can check independently is worth more here than in any other trade. Worth noting against the platforms: paying monthly, there's no long-term contract.

The shared platforms. Checkatrade, MyBuilder, Rated People and Bark all carry building work, and the money involved is small enough to be beside the point: reported figures run from about £1.80 a credit on Bark and £5–£35 a shortlist on MyBuilder up to £15–£40 a lead plus a subscription on Rated People, with Checkatrade selling a 12-month membership instead of leads. Our four-way comparison has the mechanics.

At these job values that's an inexpensive experiment. The difficulty was never the fee. It's that an enquiry reaching a platform has usually reached three other builders too, and you'll each spend a day pricing the same drawings so that two of you can be told no.

Planning-application data. Planning applications are public records, so a homeowner applying for an extension is visible before they've spoken to a builder. Several companies package this into a paid feed, pitched on getting there first.

Two things they tend not to mention. Every council publishes its planning register free, so you can look yourself if you're only covering a few areas. And whatever you pay, it's still a cold approach to someone who didn't ask to hear from you — which converts like a cold approach, and is being made by other builders who bought the same list.

The number that actually hurts

Here's the cost nobody puts on a spreadsheet.

Quoting an extension properly means a site visit, an evening with the drawings, prices chased from a groundworker and a roofer, and a materials take-off. Call it a day's work, spread across a week, none of it billable. Do that three times a month and lose two, and you've given away a fortnight of the year.

Set that against the lead fee. A £30 enquiry that costs you a day to price has a true cost closer to your day rate than to £30. The platform charged you thirty quid; the enquiry charged you £300.

Which flips the usual advice. In most trades the discipline is buying leads carefully. In building, leads are the cheap part — the discipline is deciding which ones deserve a quote.

Qualifying before you quote

The enquiries worth a site visit share three things: the budget is real, the drawings exist or are underway, and the timescale is one you could actually work to. The ones that aren't worth it usually declare themselves early, if you ask.

You don't need a script. Three questions before you commit an evening:

• What's the budget? Not "what do you want to spend" — a range. An extension enquiry with no number behind it is a conversation, not a job.
• Where are you up to? No drawings and no planning means months of nothing, and possibly a project that dies at the first quote from an architect.
• When do you want it done? "This year" and "at some point" are different projects.

None of that is rude, and none of it costs you a job worth having. A customer serious enough to spend fifty thousand pounds expects to be asked. The ones who bristle at a budget question are, reliably, the ones who were never going to book.

This is the part grafter.ly is actually built around. An enquiry that lands by email arrives as a job matched to the kind of work it is, with the questions you'd normally ask already checked against what the customer wrote — and whatever's still missing listed so you can ask for it in a couple of taps, before you've given up an evening. The answers come back on the job, so the decision to visit or not is made with the facts in front of you.

What to do with all this

Run the platforms if you like — at these job values, they're an inexpensive experiment. But if you want more building work next year, the honest order is: look after the architects, be tidy where people can see you, get a credential a homeowner can check, and then be ruthless about which enquiries get a quote.

A builder who quotes everything is busy every evening and no better off. A builder who quotes half as often and wins half of those is doing the same paid work with their evenings back.

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Sources. FMB membership pricing and the joining process are from the FMB's own become-a-member page, and the 20,000+ monthly visits figure is the FMB's own claim, both checked 28 August 2026. Per-lead figures for MyBuilder, Rated People and Bark are from the Local Adder trade lead cost tracker (last verified 22 July 2026) — reported figures rather than published tariffs, and not builder-specific. Checkatrade's published pricing is from its own guide and join page, checked 20 August 2026. Extension costs are from our own single-storey extension cost guide. Planning registers are published by each local authority; the paid feeds are commercial products built on that public data.