A roofing inquiry is not one kind of request. A homeowner fills in the same form because water came through the ceiling last night, because hail crossed the street on Tuesday, or because the roof is twenty-two years old and they have started to think about it. Those three requests decay at three different speeds, and by the time the record is sold as “aged” — weeks or months later — the first is almost always over, the second is inside an insurance timeline, and the third is about where it was. An aged roofing file mixes all three and prices them the same.
That is what makes roofing different from the other aged verticals. Solar and insurance inquiries decay on interest. A share of roofing inquiries decay on completion: the homeowner did not lose interest, they bought a roof. So the questions on this page are not only “how cheap” and “how many attempts” but “which trigger,” “what date,” and “has a permit been pulled since.”
Disclosure: Scout Data sells homeowner data and leads to roofing call centers, including files built on roof age and storm footprints rather than on inquiries, so we have a stake in the last section. The rest is written the way we would explain it to a floor manager deciding whether to buy the batch.
What you are actually buying
The row is the form. Name, address, a phone number the homeowner typed, the date it was submitted, sometimes a project type (repair or replacement), sometimes a storm tag, sometimes a self-reported roof age. In real time that record was sold to several contractors at once — the shared model exclusive vs shared leads prices — and it is resold to you after they have stopped calling it.
The pricing is public at one vendor, which is useful for the shape even if you buy elsewhere. As advertised on 19 September 2026, Aged Lead Store’s roofing page routes buyers to its home-improvement category at $1.25–2.00 per lead for leads 30–85 days old, describes “typical segments” of 15–85 and 86–500 days, says the older the lead the bigger the discount, and puts the whole category at “80–95% off the price of exclusive, real-time leads.” Its filters are “state, location, storm event, project type (repair, replacement), roof age, or inquiry recency,” which is a fair list of the fields worth insisting on from any seller.
Pricing on this page is as publicly advertised at the time of writing — confirm current pricing with each vendor, and with our sales team for Scout Data. Discounts move with age, volume and season.
Two things the row never carries: how many buyers have dialed it already, and whether the roof has been done. The first is a question for the seller — how many times sold, and when. The second you can often answer yourself, below.
Three triggers, three half-lives
| Trigger | What prompted the form | How fast it resolves | What is left when it is “aged” |
|---|---|---|---|
| Leak or repair | Water in the house, a missing section after wind | Days. The homeowner hires whoever answers first. | Usually resolved. Dial only if the file says repair and the inquiry is inside a week or two. |
| Storm | Hail or wind over the street on a known date | Weeks. The claim window, then the adjuster, then a decision. | Alive while the window is open; the event date matters more than the inquiry date. |
| Age | “It is probably time” — a roof past its local median | Months. Nothing forces the decision. | The durable one. Persistence does the work; the roof is still old. |
These are the shapes of the three decisions, not measured decay curves — we do not run the dialers that would produce one, and a seller who quotes you a contact rate for “aged roofing leads” without splitting them by trigger is quoting an average of three different products.
The age trigger is the one an aged file is good at, because it is the one that does not expire on its own. Where the same home shows two roofing permits, the median gap between them is 14 years across 309,255 observed intervals, with quartiles at 7 and 20 — and the median home is 42 years old when a roofing permit is pulled. A homeowner who filed a form because the roof is past that mark still has a roof past that mark six months later. The state-by-state medians, and why a national threshold over-targets Florida and under-targets Texas, are in roof replacement statistics and when do roofs need replacing.
The storm trigger is the one where the inquiry date is the wrong date. What matters is the event date and how much of the homeowner’s window is left — to report, to be inspected, to decide with an adjuster’s finding in hand. A storm lead sold at 60 days is a different product in a market where the window is still open than in one where it has closed, and the row usually does not say which. What happens to a footprint a month on, and why the long tail is still worth working, is in storm damage leads.
Check the permit before the dial
This is the step that has no equivalent in solar, and it is the reason a roofing floor should never load an aged batch straight from the CSV. 732,943 residential roofing permits were issued in the twelve months to August 2026 in our permit database, and every one of them is a homeowner who, if they were on an aged file, is no longer a lead. Match the batch to the address, look for a roofing permit dated after the inquiry, and suppress the hits. The rows that remain are the ones where the decision is still open — or where the work was done without a permit, which the setter will hear in the first ten seconds. How much the check catches depends on the market: the share of re-roofs that get permitted varies widely by jurisdiction, so treat it as a suppression pass that is strong in some counties and weak in others, never as proof that the remaining rows are open.
Do the same check in the other direction on the age rows. A permit dated well before the inquiry — say, four years — tells you the homeowner asked about a roof that is not old, which usually means repair or storm, and re-sorts the row. The file’s own “roof age” field is self-reported on a form; the county’s is a date.
The consent aged out with the lead
An internet lead comes with a consent story: the homeowner ticked a box on a site, agreeing to be contacted by that site’s partners. Weeks later, resold to you, that story is somebody else’s. The one vendor we quote is explicit about the consequence — its shared internet leads are for “email, direct mail, door knocking, or manual dialing not using regulated technologies to phones not on any DNC lists.” Read that as the industry’s own description of what an aged lead is licensed for: a human dialing a number that is not on the registry. Re-scrub every batch inside the 31-day window, run your internal suppression file over it, and keep the aged rows out of any campaign the dialer places automatically. The roofing-specific mechanics — including why a storm surge tempts a floor into exactly the wrong setup — are in DNC scrubbing for roofing and HVAC. None of this is legal advice; your configuration belongs with counsel.
Price it against an inspection, not a lead
The trade an aged batch offers is the same in every vertical: a much lower price per record against a lower contact rate and a lower intent per contact, worth taking when there is idle dialer capacity and a real multi-touch cadence, and worth skipping when the floor is already behind on fresh work. The capacity argument, and the fresh-versus-aged table, are in aged solar leads; they transfer to roofing unchanged, so they are not repeated here.
What changes for roofing is the unit the batch has to be measured in. A roofing lead converts to an inspection first — someone on the roof with a camera — and to a job only after that. So the number to set before buying is cost per inspection booked, with a close rate from inspection to contract that your own crews already know. Work backwards from there to what a batch can be worth per row; the arithmetic is laid out in how to price a bought lead. Then track the batch by trigger. If the age rows book inspections and the repair rows book none, the next order is age rows only, and the seller can filter for that.
Or age the roof instead of the inquiry
There is a second way to build a list of homeowners whose roofs are old, and it does not start with a form. Start with the permit record: every home whose last roofing permit is past the local median, on a block where the neighbours have started re-roofing, inside a storm footprint with the event date on the row. Nobody filled anything in, so there is no inquiry to age and no prior buyer who dialed it last month; the roof is old because the county says so, and the phone is matched to the owner on title rather than to whoever typed it. The four lists a roofing floor can build this way, what each row has to carry, and what to suppress before any of it reaches a dialer are in roofing call center leads. An aged batch fills idle hours cheaply; a permit-built list fills them with roofs that are actually old. Run both if the capacity is there, and measure both by inspections per thousand dials.
Permit-interval and permit-volume figures are from our own permit database, derived in August 2026, and are floors — a home only enters the interval sample if it was re-roofed twice inside a jurisdiction’s coverage window.
Frequently asked questions
What is an aged roofing lead?
A homeowner who asked for a roofing quote through a web form some weeks or months ago. In real time that request was sold to several contractors at once; after they moved on, the record is resold at a discount as “aged.” The row is the form: name, address, a phone, the date, and sometimes a project type or a storm tag. What it does not carry is the outcome — whether the roof has since been done — and that is the first thing to establish.
How much do aged roofing leads cost?
One vendor that prints it: as publicly advertised on 19 September 2026, Aged Lead Store’s roofing page routes to its home-improvement category at $1.25–2.00 per lead for leads 30–85 days old, describes typical segments of 15–85 and 86–500 days, and says aged leads run “80–95% off the price of exclusive, real-time leads.” Older and larger orders are cheaper. Treat those as the shape of the market rather than a quote, and price the batch against inspections booked, not leads bought.
Can I put aged roofing leads into an autodialer?
Ask the seller in writing, and expect the answer to be no. The same vendor’s page says its shared internet leads are sold “for use in email, direct mail, door knocking, or manual dialing not using regulated technologies to phones not on any DNC lists.” Whatever consent the homeowner gave on the form was given to the sites named on it, weeks ago; it does not travel to you with the CSV. Manual dial, scrub inside the 31-day window, and confirm your setup with counsel.
How do I tell whether an aged roofing lead already got the roof done?
Look for a roofing permit at the address dated after the inquiry. In markets where re-roofs are routinely permitted, a permit pulled since the form was filed means the job went to someone else — suppress the row rather than dial it. Where re-roofs are rarely permitted, or the file has no address match, the setter asks in the first ten seconds and dispositions honestly. Either way, sort the batch by trigger and by date before it reaches the floor.