Owned vs. Rented

How We Cut the Aggregator in Half (And What We Built First)

When I joined the company in 2019, the marketing department’s lead generation strategy was basically: buy them. HomeAdvisor. Angi. Porch. Modernize. A handful of aggregators selling shared leads — same homeowner, four competing contractors, race to the phone. Three years later, we cut the primary aggregator in half while organic grew 2.4x. This is what we built before we made that cut.

What the 2019 landscape actually looked like

The company’s online reputation was actually strong for its size — somewhere around a 4.7 with a few hundred reviews — but the website was, in my own assessment at the time, absolute trash, with zero SEO presence. Digital marketing as a discipline simply did not exist yet. There was radio running around 80% cost of marketing. Horrendous. It built the brand over time, but you couldn’t point to an 80% COM and call it a working channel.

I wasn’t running any of that. I was 23, hired to rebuild a door-to-door division that had collapsed when the previous manager moved to the sales team. By the end of that first year we’d done $900K in D2D net sales at roughly 9–10% COM — immediately the company’s largest revenue source other than repeat business. I was not thinking about the aggregators. But I was watching what they actually produced: leads already shopped against three competitors, at full market price, with zero compounding.

2020: building while the rented channels were still dominant

COVID hit and everyone had questions. We kept knocking — because every canvasser stays ten feet from a door anyway — and finished at $2.2M in canvass at around 12% COM. That same year, I was looking over the full scheduling numbers for the first time and found something that shouldn’t have been possible to miss: canvass was booked out two to three months while the call center was booking next-day. The company was simultaneously drowning in owned leads and leaving capacity idle, while the rented channel filled every slot at market price. I took it to leadership. The response was approximately: “Oh yeah, that’s a good point.”

That scheduling gap was a proof point I’d carry forward: owned leads were being wasted while rented ones filled the calendar.

2021: the year the math moved

Google LSA revenue doubled. Google Ads launched with a new agency. And the HomeAdvisor volume dropped to roughly half — deliberately, as a rebalancing call. Organic grew 2.4x, partly COVID tailwind, partly a measurement correction that finally separated Google organic from direct. Canvass hit the $1.99M / 15.5% ledger. By end of year, the channel mix looked completely different than 2019.

You can’t exit rented leads by canceling them. You exit them by building enough owned volume that the rented leads become the redundant part of the mix.

What the data doesn’t fully show

By 2021, a homeowner searching for a home services company in our market was increasingly finding an owned presence before they hit an aggregator form. When they found us there, they weren’t a shared lead — they’d chosen to call. That customer is easier to sell, less likely to shop on price, and more likely to leave a review. You can’t put that in a cost-per-lead comparison. But you feel it in the close rate, and you feel it when a customer mentions they’d driven past your trucks a dozen times before they called.

The aggregators didn’t disappear; they just stopped being load-bearing. That’s the exit: not cancellation, but irrelevance. If you want to know where your mix sits and what the migration path looks like, that’s what the free audit maps. It starts here.