HVAC Leads: Bought, Rented or Owned?

HVAC leads come from three places: a seller who charges you for each one, a platform you rent such as Google Local Services Ads or Yelp Ads, and sources you already own, like your own search ads, your Business Profile and your maintenance agreement list. Compare all three the same way, by what they cost per completed job and per sold system, not by price per lead.

Quick answer

• Sort every source into bought, rented or owned, and ask the same four questions of each: how you pay, who else gets the same lead, what you can dispute, and what you record.
• Log every lead the day it arrives: source, job type (service call or replacement), amount charged, booked, completed, disputed.
• Read the log 60 days after a month closes, so a replacement sold after a repair visit has time to show up.
• Skip any industry-average price per lead. Work out the most you can pay from your own close rate and what a completed job of that type leaves you.
• Judge a blended source, such as search ads that start as repair calls, on repair profit alone unless you are also counting the replacement estimates it produced.

What are the three ways to get HVAC leads?

What should you know before buying a lead from a seller?

The two pricing models to ask about are a flat price per lead no matter the outcome, and pay per call, where you pay only once a call connects and runs past a set length. A shared lead goes to more than one HVAC company at close to the same moment, so you are racing the others to call back; an exclusive lead goes to you alone, at a higher price. Before paying, get in writing how many companies share the lead, what disqualifies one for a return, such as a disconnected number or a duplicate, and your window to ask.

How Angi and Thumbtack price and credit leads covers those two in detail; the questions above apply to any seller you have not already vetted. Watch the gap between what a seller's dashboard counts as a lead and what your own schedule shows as a booked, paid job: why an ad or lead report counts more than your records do explains where that gap comes from on the ad side, and the same check works on a lead seller's count.

What do Local Services Ads and Yelp Ads charge, and what can you dispute?

Local Services Ads are Google's ads billed per valid lead rather than per click, and Google says a lead can be valid when a customer texts or emails you, leaves a voicemail or meaningfully engages with the automated system, when you answer and speak with the customer, when you return a missed call that left no voicemail by text, email or a call where you speak with the customer or leave a voicemail, or when you get a booking request (Google, checked 2026-10-05). A missed call with no voicemail that you never return is not on that list. For a lead you judge poor, rate it in Google's Feedback Survey, which Google says occasionally earns a credit; charged leads also get reassessed by Google's models over time, with some credited automatically as low quality (Google, checked 2026-10-05). That same page lists leads that won't be credited, among them a valid lead received outside your business hours, a customer who asked for advice on a project, a canceled booking, and a customer who never responds to your return call or message.

Yelp Ads bills differently. Yelp's own support page says: "Each time your ad is clicked, we will charge you according to your CPC price," a price that moves with the "supply and demand of that moment," including how many similar businesses compete for the same clicks and how much ad inventory is available, and never goes past the monthly budget you set (Yelp, checked 2026-10-05). So Yelp charges for the click, not for the lead behind it: a click that never turns into a call or form still costs you, where Local Services Ads only bills once a lead meets its own definition above. As for disputes, Yelp says it does not bill "for clicks that come in rapid succession from the same user" and investigates reports of click fraud (Yelp, checked 2026-10-05).

Local Services Ads is also moving into the main Google Ads platform, still aimed at pay-per-lead goals (Google, checked 2026-10-05). What else changes in that move covers the badge, the billing and what to save before your account migrates.

Which leads do you already own?

Your Business Profile can be added or claimed "at no charge" (Google, checked 2026-10-05), and once verified it lets customers find you on Search and Maps with no per-lead fee, only the time spent on photos, hours and replies. Your own search ads cost per click, same as Yelp's, but you set the keywords and landing page rather than renting a platform's matching. Your maintenance agreement list and past customers cost nothing to call again, though both still need a reason, such as a tune-up due date or a system near the age your techs flag for replacement.

Search ads are the owned source I know best: I bought media on Google Ads and Meta Ads between October 2023 and September 2025, nearly $700K of spend. A repair-intent search campaign (ads on searches like "ac repair near me") is a blended source, so judge it on repair profit first, then add the replacement estimates it produced inside the 60-day window the log below uses.

How much should you pay for a lead?

I found no primary source with a usable average price per lead, and one would hide more than it shows anyway, since a service-call lead (a repair visit) and a replacement lead (a new system) leave very different money behind. Work out your own ceiling: max price per lead equals close rate times gross profit per job, run once for service-call leads and once for replacement leads.

Close rate is completed, paid jobs from that source divided by leads from that source. Gross profit per job means the invoice total less the parts and paid labor that job used, leaving out rent and salaried time, which do not change with one more job.

What should a lead log track, and how do you read it after 60 days?

One row per lead, filled in the day it arrives.

Read it 60 days after the month closes, so a replacement sold after a repair visit has time to land in the row of the lead that started it.

Illustrative: every number below is made up. The month belongs to an imaginary single-location HVAC company running three trucks, and no figure comes from a client. It keeps $180 gross profit on an average completed service call and $2,400 on an average installed system.

Price per lead alone ranks these backward. The bought leads were cheapest at $45 and left the thinnest margin, $180, since none became a system. Local Services Ads cost nearly three times as much per lead, $120, and left the most by far, $9,600, because every job it produced was a replacement, and a system's gross profit dwarfs a service call's.

Search ads sit in between. Graded on service calls alone they lose $600, $1,800 against $2,400 spent, but two of those ten repair visits turned into signed systems inside 60 days, adding $4,800 and making search ads the second-best source here. Judged before those two systems signed, they would have looked like the worst.

What should you ask a seller or platform rep before you pay?

• Is this lead shared with other HVAC companies, or sold to me alone?
• What disqualifies a lead for a credit, and how many days do I have to ask?
• Is the price set per lead or per call, and at what call length does a call start counting?
• Can you send a monthly file with every lead's date, ID and amount charged, so I can match it to my own schedule?
• For a platform: how is a lead or a click defined, and what is the process for disputing one?