Solar installers: how to spot new roofs before your competitors

The single best solar lead in residential PV is a homeowner who is already pulling a re-roof permit. They've already decided to spend money on the roof, they've already lined up a roofing crew, and they're inside the 60-day window where adding solar to the project is a phone call instead of a year-long decision.

And yet most solar BD teams are still buying $300 leads from aggregators, knocking on cold doors, and competing on price after the homeowner has already shopped three quotes. The opportunity is to show up before the shopping starts — and the public record tells you exactly when that window opens.

When a homeowner pulls a re-roof permit, they are inside the highest-intent solar buying window of their lifetime. The roofing crew is about to be on their property. The roof is about to be torn off. Mounting hardware can be integrated cleanly instead of retrofitted. Every roof-and-solar combo job we've seen close was sourced this way — usually within 7 days of the re-roof permit issuing.

Tract-builder subdivisions issue master site permits months before the first house breaks ground. National builders increasingly offer PV pre-wire as a standard or optional package — knowing which builders, in which subdivisions, on which timeline, is what lets a solar EPC win the install on hundreds of homes at once instead of one at a time. The data is in the public record. The teams winning are reading it.

• The homeowner has already committed to roof-level spending. The economic decision is half-made.
• The roof is being touched anyway. Mounting hardware integrates cleanly during the tear-off and re-install.
• The roofing contractor is already on site or scheduled. You can coordinate a single visit.
• Most homeowners don't realize this window exists. You're not competing with five other solar quotes — you're the only one showing up.
• The conversation isn't "will you go solar?" — it's "while the roof is open, do you want PV?" — a much narrower, much easier yes.

1. Filter the live re-roof permit feed to your service-area zip codes. Save it as a workspace.
2. Set an alert for every new permit. Inside Tibly, this lands as a push notification or a Slack channel message — your team sees it the same day.
3. Within 72 hours, the BD rep makes contact. The pitch is timed to the roof, not generic.
4. Coordinate the install with the roofing contractor — most are happy to work with a solar partner if it doesn't slow them down.
5. Cross-reference new-build permits monthly. Identify which tract builders are active in your service area and reach out at the master-site stage, not the lot stage.

If you're closing solar one rooftop at a time, your CAC scales linearly with revenue. The teams scaling fastest layer a tract-builder partnership program on top of the one-rooftop flow — same operating model, batched installs at a builder-level rate.

Aggregator leads are shopped by every other solar EPC in the metro by the time you get them. You're not paying for a lead — you're paying for a homeowner-shaped object that's about to be in five sales pipelines simultaneously. The permit feed gives you the same homeowner before any of those competitors have heard of them.

The roofer on the job has the homeowner's trust, their phone number, and a real reason to make introductions. Building a partnership channel with 5-10 strong residential roofers in your service area is the single highest-leverage move a solar BD team can make. The permit feed shows you which roofers are most active — start there.

Pull the last 60 days of re-roof permits in your top 3 service-area zip codes. Plot the addresses on a map. Count how many of those homes still have unshaded south- or west-facing roof area — that's your install candidate list. For most BD teams that exercise turns up 30-80 ready-to-pitch addresses no one else has reached out to. That's a week's worth of high-conversion outreach hiding in the public record.