Looking for a roofing company that does free estimates, is local, and does financing! TIA 🙏
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Otomizer research
2026 Home Services Demand Report
Homeowners in the United States ask their neighbors who to hire far more often than the marketing industry seems to have noticed. It happens in local Facebook groups, thousands of times a day, and almost none of it shows up in keyword tools, ad platforms or lead marketplace dashboards.
This report sets out what we see running these groups: how often requests appear, which trades produce the most, and what actually decides which company gets contacted. We publish the underlying rates rather than only the conclusions, so you can check them against your own market.
660+
Active local groups in a typical metro county of 1.5 million people
1625+
Service requests a month across the eight trades we track, in that same county
3,144
US counties and county equivalents where this pattern repeats
Request rates by trade
Which trades get asked about most
Rates are expressed per 100,000 households, which is the only way to compare a county of 90,000 people with one of four million. The right hand column shows what that works out to in a reference metro county of 1.5 million residents.
| Trade | Requests per 100k households | In a 1.5M county | Average job |
|---|---|---|---|
| Plumbing | 75 a month | 350 to 530 | $4,200 |
| HVAC | 60 a month | 280 to 425 | $8,500 |
| Pest Control | 55 a month | 255 to 390 | $650 |
| Roofing | 45 a month | 210 to 320 | $12,400 |
| Electrical | 42 a month | 195 to 300 | $3,800 |
| Kitchen & Bath Remodeling | 34 a month | 155 to 240 | $28,000 |
| Water & Fire Restoration | 22 a month | 100 to 160 | $15,000 |
| Solar | 18 a month | 80 to 130 | $22,000 |
Volume and value pull in opposite directions. Plumbing produces the most requests and the smallest tickets. Remodeling and solar produce the fewest and the largest. Neither is better, they just need different follow-up.
Findings
Five things that decide who gets the call
Under an hour
The window is shorter than anyone plans for
A recommendation thread in an active local group typically collects most of its replies within the first hour, and the homeowner usually contacts someone before the thread stops moving. Contractors who check Facebook once a day are not competing in these threads. They are reading the results afterwards.
First two named
Position in the thread beats everything else
Homeowners reading eleven comments do not evaluate eleven companies. They contact the first two names that have agreement underneath them. Being third is functionally the same as being absent, which is why response time matters more here than reputation, price or reviews.
Private groups
The best requests are in the groups you cannot join casually
Subdivision and neighborhood groups have admin approval, membership questions, and rules against promotion. They also carry the highest trust and the most specific requests. Public city pages have more volume and much more noise. Most competitors work only the public ones, because the private ones require an account with real history.
Weather, not season
Demand arrives in bursts, not curves
For roofing, restoration and plumbing, a single hail event or hard freeze can produce more requests in 48 hours than the preceding month. Annual averages hide this completely. Planning coverage around the average means being understaffed exactly when the volume that matters arrives.
One post, several jobs
Threads generate more than the original poster
Other members regularly reply saying they have the same problem. This is most pronounced in pest control and HVAC, where a single well-timed comment on a swarm or outage post can produce several separate enquiries from people who were not going to post themselves.
Language
How these requests are actually worded
Nobody types "I am seeking a licensed contractor for roof replacement services". They type the way people type. That matters, because keyword matching built for search queries misses most of this.
AC just died and it is 108 outside. Two kids in the house. Who can actually come out today? Not looking for a big chain.
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Water heater is leaking all over the garage floor. Need a reliable plumber who can replace it today or tomorrow. Recommendations?
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Representative examples of the phrasing patterns we see. Names are invented.
Method
How these numbers are produced
We would rather show the working than publish a big number with no provenance, so here is exactly what we do.
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1. Population comes from the US Census
County population estimates, vintage 2024, published by the Census Bureau. Public data you can download and check.
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2. Households are population divided by 2.55
The national average household size from the American Community Survey. Households are the right unit here, because a household hires a roofer, not an individual.
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3. Rates come from the counties we operate in
The per-trade rates in the table above are what we observe across our own monitored groups, normalised per 100,000 households. We publish them in full, including the assumptions behind them, so you can check them against your own market.
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4. Everything is shown as a range
Plus or minus twenty percent, because a model applied to a county we have not personally counted deserves error bars. Where we do have real monitoring data for a county, that replaces the model entirely and we label it as measured.
Get the counted version
This report is a model built on public population data and our own operating experience across the counties we run. If you want the real numbers for one specific county, tell us your trade and county and a person here will spend a couple of hours counting groups and recent requests by hand, then send you what they found.
Want the counted version for your county?
Tell us your trade and county and somebody here will go and count the groups, the membership and the recent requests by hand. You get it by email within 24 hours, whether or not you become a client.
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