[mswen]

This reminded me of a conversation I had with a business owner in southern Florida. I was showing him a demo of some mapping technology I had played around with and mentioned that I was also involved in some web crawling and NLP stuff. He mentioned the following opportunity.

If you could crawl and scrape public records to determine when the Air/Conditioning units had last been replaced at each property and then map it. He was convinced that HVAC companies have a good sense of the age of units that are needing replacement. One would generate lead maps specific to properties so that a sales person could focus only on the properties that had units approaching replacement age. This was around 2010. I poked around in the public records a bit and decided I wasn't the right person - even if technically possible.

I am not sure of the market validity of this idea but you might be better suited to this kind of thing than I was.

[verelo]

Funny your example is hvac, i recently made an “instant quote form” for a friend who works in hvac (interiorclimatesolutions.com)

I agree though, i feel like lead gen is how this has to pay for itself. I’ve been resisting that path but it feels like i need to reconsider the model as there are likely ways to do it. I just don’t get as excited by it, but perhaps that’ll change.