What a custom home builder should ask a marketing agency

Late February is when a custom builder’s week fills with design meetings for houses that should break ground in spring, and it is also when agencies come calling. Plenty of them arrive with a contractor package already built: a few search campaigns, a Local Services Ads setup and a monthly report on cost per lead. That package was made for trades where a homeowner calls on Tuesday and the job is done by Friday. The questions below find out, in one meeting, whether an agency knows a custom home is different. Put them to anyone you are considering, including us.

A custom home is sold over a year, so the report has to cover one

Start with time. The most recent Census Bureau averages, for homes completed in 2024, put a contractor-built single-family home at 10.6 months from start to completion and an owner-built one at 13.7 months. Before the start come land questions, design, financing and the permit. A family that first emails you this week may not break ground until summer and may not move in until the following year.

The market is not small, either. NAHB’s January analysis counted 51,000 custom starts in the third quarter of 2025, more than 19% of all single-family starts. Custom work is roughly a fifth of single-family building, sold one contract at a time.

A cost-per-lead report every thirty days means very little in a business with that rhythm. Ask:

• “How will you report on an inquiry that takes most of a year to become a contract?” A good answer names stages: first contact, lot, design agreement, lender approval, signed contract. A weak answer is a dashboard of clicks.
• “Which number will you hold yourselves to?” For a builder it is cost per signed contract across a season, not cost per lead in a given month.
• “What happens to a family that goes quiet in April?” Clients pause for the lender, the land or a family conversation about money. The follow-up should be planned, not improvised.

Questions that show whether they know the rules builders work under

Home building carries rules a generic contractor package skips. Four questions sort agencies quickly.

• “Where will my license number appear?” California’s Business and Professions Code section 7030.5 requires a contractor’s license number in all forms of advertising. Florida Statute 489.119 requires the registration or certification number in every offer of services, bid, contract or advertisement, regardless of medium, and the state board answers a first offense with a notice of noncompliance, with fines possible after that. If you build in either state and the agency has not asked for your number, it has not done the homework.
• “Will my license cover what you plan to show?” North Carolina makes the point clearly. Its statute caps a limited license at single projects worth up to $750,000 and an intermediate license at $1,500,000, with only an unlimited license carrying no ceiling. An ad featuring a home your license does not cover is a problem before it is ever a lead.
• “How will you target the ads?” Google’s personalized advertising policy does not let housing ads in the US and Canada target people by age, gender, parental status, marital status or ZIP code. A listing for a spec home is plainly housing. An agency that proposes ZIP code targeting for your inventory has not read the policy.
• “Do Local Services Ads make sense for me?” Google has no home builder category. The closest is General contractor, which comes with background checks on the business and its owner, general and professional liability insurance, and a state license check where the law requires one. Those ads now carry the Google Verified badge that took over from the old Guaranteed badge last October. In the accounts we have seen, the leads lean toward remodels and repairs, so an honest agency will call it an experiment rather than a foundation.

What the first ninety days should look like for a builder

The order gives an agency away. A contractor package starts with ad spend. A plan written for a custom builder starts with the pages a family reads while deciding, and only then pays for traffic.

• Weeks 1 to 3, the portfolio and the process. Each finished home written up with its floor area, the lot, how long the build took and what the contract covered. A page that walks through design, financing, permit and construction in order. Your license number wherever your state wants it.
• Weeks 3 to 6, the pipeline. Call and form tracking, a text back when a call is missed, and CRM stages that match how your contracts actually come together.
• Weeks 5 to 10, being found. Your Google Business Profile cleaned up, pages for the counties and towns you build in, and search campaigns on build terms set up inside Google’s housing rules from the start.
• Weeks 8 to 12, past clients. Review requests to every family you have built for, and warranty check-ins that keep you in touch.

If a proposal puts ads in week one and the portfolio in month four, ask why.

What a monthly report should show a builder

LocaliQ’s 2025 home services benchmarks, covering campaigns from April 2024 to March 2025, have no category for home builders. The nearest, Construction & Contractors (General), had a median cost per lead of $165.67 on Google search and a median conversion rate of 2.61%, the lowest conversion rate of any home service category in the report. Those are medians, not a forecast, but they set honest expectations: inquiries cost more than in most trades.

A report worth reading each month includes:

• Inquiries by source and by stage, so you can see which channel produces design agreements and not just form fills.
• Calls answered and missed, with how quickly each missed call was returned.
• Reviews gained and the date of the newest one. BrightLocal’s 2026 consumer survey, published earlier this month, found 47% of consumers will not use a business with fewer than 20 reviews, a number a builder finishing a handful of homes a year has to plan for.
• The search terms that triggered your ads, with remodel and repair queries already excluded.
• A few sentences from a person who looked at the account, saying what changed and why.

What we are telling builders this month

• Write down the stages your last five contracts went through, and ask every agency to report on those stages.
• If you build in California or Florida, check every ad, yard sign and web page for your license number this week.
• Confirm what your license allows you to build before any ad shows a larger home.
• Ask each agency how it would target housing ads without age or ZIP code settings, and listen for a specific answer.
• Send review requests to clients from the last three years, not only the most recent move-in.
• Have someone outside the company read your portfolio pages and note every question the pages leave unanswered.

Any agency that can answer all of this without reaching for a script deserves a second meeting. Our page for custom home builders sets out the order we work in, and our website work shows how we build portfolio and process pages that answer a family’s questions before the first call.