Ask every past customer for referrals, more than once, and pay a set reward when the referred job signs. Owners report paying $200 to $500 a referral, and one who offers every customer about $500 in advertising credit and asks at least three times says about 10% of his business comes that way. In Roofing Contractor’s 2025 homeowner survey, 79% said they’d look for a roofer through referrals or recommendations, ahead of 62% who’d search online, though it gives no sample size.
On a job an insurance claim pays for, check your state’s or province’s law before paying anyone for a referral, past customers included. Florida bans it, with fines up to $10,000 per violation. Kentucky caps any payment to the homeowner at $100, and Minnesota bars paying the homeowner for referrals. Texas and Colorado restrict paying or rebating the homeowner’s deductible and say nothing about referral rewards, which leaves the question open there. I run Zentora, a marketing company for roofers, so take the legal questions to a lawyer.
Owners split on realtors, and one who is also a realtor says they’re worth contacting if you do small repairs and find leaks. For a DFW roofing client we emailed 342 listing agents about hail over their listings, and by September 23 that had brought one inspection, which found no damage. Insurance agents send one owner most of his leads.
Owners report paying past customers $200 to $500 a referral
Owners on r/RoofingSales report these rewards, two of them paid only once the referred job signs, so a referral that never buys costs nothing:
- $500, split with the sales rep. “I like to use an amount that makes a homeowner go wide eyed,” that owner wrote in 2024.
- $250 to $500, from another owner the same year.
- A $200 gift card, paid only when the referred homeowner hires him and kept off the original job’s contract.
- A $300 check for any referral that reaches a contract, from a commenter in 2025.
Someone about to buy a 20-year-old Texas roofing company, which he said gets 55% of its sales from referrals, was weighing $25 a lead against $250 once the referred job closes. I found no survey of what roofers pay, so all of these figures are self-reported.
Keep the reward away from Google reviews. Google bans offering anything for a review, a stricter line than the FTC’s 2024 rule against rewards that depend on what the review says, and it bans asking only the customers you expect to be happy. The owner who splits $500 with his reps pays it for a review or a word to friends, and the review half breaks Google’s policy, so pay for the referral and ask for the review separately. How Roofers Get More Google Reviews (and Deal With Fake Ones)
Florida, Kentucky and Minnesota restrict referral rewards on claim jobs
Owners on r/RoofingSales disagree about whether a $500 bonus to a past customer is legal on an insurance job, and one said he’d never seen an insurance regulator go after anyone for it. As of October 2026, I found three state laws that restrict it on insurance-funded work:
- Florida (statute 489.147). A contractor may not offer or accept “any compensation, inducement, or reward” for referring work that property insurance pays for. Fines run up to $10,000 per violation, with no exception for small amounts. Read literally, that covers rewards to past customers, realtors and insurance agents on claim jobs, and cash jobs fall outside it.
- Kentucky (KRS 367.628). On work expected to be paid from insurance, a contractor can’t pay the homeowner more than $100 in any form, and the law names referral fees.
- Minnesota (statute 325E.66). A residential contractor paid from insurance can’t offer to pay the homeowner for referring the contractor to others. If one does, the insurer doesn’t have to consider its estimate.
Texas and Colorado go after the deductible instead. Colorado bars a roofer paid from insurance from promising to pay, waive or rebate it. Under Texas Business and Commerce Code 27.02, covering or waiving it without the insurer’s consent, including through a rebate or credit, is a Class B misdemeanor. Neither law mentions referral fees, nor does the Texas Department of Insurance’s consumer page on the Texas one, and no source I found says whether a reward paid later, apart from the original contract, counts as a rebate. In a state like these, ask an insurance or construction lawyer before paying one on a claim job, and check your own state’s or province’s law the same way.
Texas is clearer on public adjusters, who may not accept a fee of any kind or amount for referring a homeowner to a contractor, or pay you for sending homeowners their way.
From 2026, the IRS wants referral fees one professional pays another reported on a 1099-NEC once they reach $2,000 in a year. I couldn’t confirm how to report a gift card to a homeowner, so ask your accountant.
Insurance agents send one owner most of his leads
“Most of my leads come from insurance agents trying to help customers,” an owner on r/Roofing wrote in 2023. His advice to a new roofing business was to meet the local agents, tell them you aren’t “a bully supplement company”, stand behind your work and ask to be a preferred vendor. A self-described insurance agent in a hail-prone state wrote in March 2026 that his referrals brought his roofer $2 million in revenue the year before. Both accounts are self-reported, and the second comes from the agent’s side.
We picked listing agents for our client instead, guessing that someone with a closing date takes a stranger’s call this week while most insurance agents take months to win over. One inspection hasn’t proved that guess, and that owner’s experience points the other way.
Carriers can also route a claim past the agent, as State Farm’s Select Service program does when it matches an eligible claim with a background-checked local roofer from its network. Florida’s ban covers paying an insurance agent on claim work, and I found no rule either way in Texas. Until a lawyer in your state says otherwise, I’d earn agent referrals the way that owner describes and keep money out of it.
Realtors suit roofers who do small repairs and find leaks
Real estate agents sit on almost every resale: in the National Association of Realtors’ 2025 profile, 91% of sellers used one. “If you just do insurance work, it’s probably a waste of time,” a licensed realtor who also owns a roofing company wrote on r/RoofingSales in 2025. For roofers who do small repairs at good prices and can find leaks, he said, realtors are worth contacting.
Others are warier: one commenter said realtors mainly want a roofer’s letterhead and estimate to negotiate after the buyer’s inspection, and one owner charges them a $250 estimating fee to weed out time-wasters. Another commenter said they kept wanting more free work, and a sales rep stopped chasing them because sellers usually want the roof done as cheaply as possible.
If you pay a realtor, NAR’s code makes members disclose the fee to their client. Texas, the one state whose real estate rules I checked, also requires the client’s consent and bars agents from trading referral fees with other “settlement service providers”, which include inspectors and anyone whose service another provider requires the borrower or seller to pay for. Neither that rule nor the federal ban on kickbacks around home-loan closings (RESPA) names roofers, so whether a repair the lender or buyer requires puts you inside them is a lawyer’s call. Both allow payment for services performed. Look up your own state’s real estate commission rule before you pay.
Our hail-report emails to 342 listing agents brought one inspection
For a DFW roofing client, we emailed listing agents whose active listing sat under hail of 1.5 inches or more in 2026. Each email linked to a report on that listing built from NOAA radar hail detections and offered a free inspection with written findings, claiming only that hail had passed over the address.
By September 23, 342 agents had one email and 84 had a follow-up. Twelve people replied (3.5%), and five of them said the house had sold or the roof was already handled. One agent asked for an inspection after the follow-up. The crew found no damage, so the campaign has one inspection to show and no job. Listings also sold under us: four weeks after we pulled the agents, 89 of the 346 we hadn’t yet written to no longer had a hail-hit listing up.
The first 98 emails went out before the domain’s email authentication worked, which was our mistake, and most landed in spam. An August inbox test, sent while the domain had no DKIM record (the signature that proves an email came from it), put 25% in the inbox. Only Outlook let it through, and Gmail and Yahoo addresses made up 72% of our list. Leaving out those first 98, we estimate nearer 240 agents than 342 could have seen the email.
The one agent who asked for an inspection then waited three days. The request arrived three minutes after our automated follow-up, which went out in the same thread from the office address, and we took the follow-up for a human reply. Give one named person the job of answering every partner who writes back. Missed Calls Cost Roofing Jobs: How Fast to Answer and How to Follow Up
If you email realtors or agents yourself, set up your domain’s email authentication first, because mail without it can land in spam with nothing bouncing back to warn you. In the US, CAN-SPAM covers business-to-business email too: each message needs a valid postal address and an opt-out you honor within 10 business days, and each one that breaks the rules can draw a penalty of up to $53,088.
Owners can’t tell which partner pays until they log every referral
A first-year owner grossing just under $1 million, trying everything from lunch talks for insurance agents to fees for past customers, asked other owners which to lean into. A rep wrote in September 2026 that he couldn’t tell which partners had turned into signed jobs the quarter before (he’s building a tool to track it).
An owner who puts out yard signs and pays a small referral fee says jobsite leads bring him one or two new jobs a week, which he tracks. Another paid $3,000 for a year in a referral group that takes one company per trade, and has signed seven figures of commercial work since. A big storm hit a month after he joined, so nobody can say how much of that the group earned.
Start with past customers, and count what each partner signs
Ask every customer for a referral more than once and pay when the referred job signs, checking your state’s law first on any claim job. Write the referral source on every inspection when it’s booked. Each quarter, divide what each partner cost you, rewards and lunches included, by the jobs they signed. How to Track Which Marketing Brings In Your Roofing Jobs
To see where your Google profile shows up when a homeowner searches for a roofer, run Zentora’s free Google Maps heatmap. Pick your Google profile and a search, and in a few minutes you’ll see your rank at 49 points around your office.