Rated People is a UK website that matches homeowners with tradespeople for jobs such as plumbing, roofing, decorating and building work. Homeowners post a job for free, and tradespeople pay for the contact details of the jobs they want to quote for, so for a trade business it is a paid source of leads rather than a free directory listing.
How Rated People works
A homeowner describes the job, the location and roughly when it needs doing. Rated People passes the job to tradespeople registered for that trade and area. A tradesperson who wants it buys the lead, which releases the customer’s details so they can call and quote. Only a small number of tradespeople can buy each lead, so you are usually competing with others for the same job.
Membership plans and lead prices vary by trade, job size and location, and the terms change, so check current pricing and any credit policy for invalid leads before you sign up. After the work, the customer can rate the tradesperson, and those ratings build a public profile that later customers see when deciding whom to hire.
Why it matters
For a new trade business, or one moving into a new area, Rated People can produce enquiries quickly, without waiting for search visibility or word of mouth to build. It can also be a useful early source of ratings. The catch is that you pay for every lead whether or not you win the job, and you are often one of several firms ringing the same person.
That makes the real measure not the price of a lead but the cost of each job won. As a made-up example: if leads cost £15 each and you win one in five, every job has cost £75 in leads before you count the time spent travelling to quote. Whether that is good value depends entirely on what a typical job is worth to you.
It is also worth comparing with channels you own. A Google Business Profile and your own website build an asset that keeps working; a lead marketplace stops producing the moment you stop paying, and the customer’s first relationship is with the platform.
Common mistakes
- Judging the platform on the number of leads rather than on jobs won and profit made.
- Buying leads outside the area or job size you actually want, just to stay busy.
- Calling back hours later. Homeowners often book whoever reaches them first with a clear answer.
- Not recording where each job came from, so there is nothing to compare against Checkatrade, MyBuilder, Bark, Google or referrals.
- Relying on one marketplace for most of your work, which leaves you exposed to any change in its pricing or rules.
How to act on it
Before joining, decide which jobs you want: the trade, the type of work, the minimum value and the postcodes you will travel to. Set your preferences on the platform to match, and resist buying leads that fall outside them.
Keep a simple log for every lead: date, cost, whether you made contact, whether you quoted, whether you won and the job value. After two or three months you will know your win rate and your cost per job, which you can compare fairly with other channels. Reply quickly, quote clearly, and ask every customer for a rating on Rated People and a review on Google.
If the log shows you are paying heavily for leads, the long-term alternative is building enquiries you do not pay for one by one. That is what my SEO for trades and home services is designed to do, alongside any lead platforms you decide to keep.