How should we evaluate a lead service before buying?

Ask for a sample restricted to your actual territory and service lines, then check three things by hand: how many projects you already knew about, how many contacts are reachable and correct, and how many records reflect the project's current stage. That sample tells you more than any coverage claim.

No. Beyond the point where a person can review the feed, additional volume reduces value because triage time grows and genuinely good projects get missed. Matched, verified, and current beats large.

Do we still need separate public and private services?

Only if your tooling forces the split. The underlying work is the same — find it early, read it fast, call the right person, keep the record — and running it in one pipeline removes the reconciliation work that separate services create.

Guide

Construction lead services compared: what to look for

Construction lead services differ on five things that actually matter: how early in the project lifecycle they see a job, whether a person verified it, whether the record is updated as the project moves, whether it carries usable contacts, and whether it filters to your services and territory instead of your ZIP code. Volume is the least useful comparison, because a service that hands you a thousand irrelevant rows costs more in wasted hours than it saves.

How early does it see the job?

A service built on bid invitations shows you projects at the most competitive possible moment. A service built on permits shows you projects after the design team and usually the contractor are chosen. A service built on planning, design, and pre-design activity shows you projects while decisions are still open.

Ask for the distribution, not the earliest example. What share of the projects arrive before permit filing?

Did a person verify it?

Scraped data is cheap to produce and expensive to use. Automated collection generates duplicates, stale entries, abandoned filings, and contacts that were never confirmed as connected to the project.

Human verification changes the economics: a smaller number of records, each of which is worth a phone call. The relevant question is who confirms a project before it reaches you, and what specifically they confirm — scope, stage, timing, and the people involved.

Is the record maintained?

A project is not a static fact. Scope changes, schedules slip, general contractors get selected, projects stall. A record captured once and never revisited is misleading within months.

Ask how often records are refreshed and whether stage transitions are tracked. Daily updates with explicit lifecycle stages are the difference between a lead list and a pipeline.

Can you call someone?

A project record without a name is a research assignment. Confirm which roles are typically included — owner, developer, general contractor, architect — and whether contacts are attached to the specific project or merely to the company somewhere.

Does it match your business?

Radius filtering is not matching. Real matching combines the services you actually sell, the territory your crews can serve, and the project sizes worth pursuing, then ranks results so a person can work the top of the list rather than triaging all of it.

Finally, count what you are already paying. Most teams run a public bid service, a private lead service, portal alerts, and a spreadsheet to reconcile them. The right comparison is against that whole stack — cost, and the hours spent moving between them.

Last reviewed August 2026

How Hank automates this

Hank covers both sides in one feed: 50,000+ public sources for solicitations and the budgets, minutes, plans, grants, awards, and expiring contracts behind them, plus 2,500+ new commercial projects a month verified by real researchers, tracked through six lifecycle stages, updated daily, and carrying owner, developer, general contractor, and architect contacts — all matched to your services, territory, and project size.

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What is Hank?

Hank helps companies find, pursue, and win construction and services work — public and private. On the public side, Hank reads more than 50,000 sources nationwide: active solicitations plus the budgets, board records, capital plans, grants, awards, forecasts, and expiring contracts that reveal work earlier. On the private side, Hank adds more than 2,500 new commercial projects every month, researched and confirmed by people and updated daily as each job moves from pre-design through planning, design, permitting, bidding, and construction. Hank matches both records to your services, territory, and project size; reads a published bid in 1–3 minutes; names the agency, owner, developer, general contractor, and architect contacts to call; answers pursuit questions; and, where enabled, assembles an editable proposal draft from your approved company knowledge. Your team gets 6–7 hours back each week and keeps every signal, source, contact, document, conversation, and pursuit in one connected record.