THE SHORT ANSWER
Expect to pay EUR 50 to EUR 185 for an exclusive lead in Brussels, roughly 25 percent above the Belgian national average. Behind that price sits a metro of about 910,000 households, an estimated 31,000 to 54,000 of which commission qualifying home-improvement work each year. Start with the local business profile and purchased exclusive leads; open a paid search account only once you can calculate what a click is worth from your own close rate.
Every contractor asks the same two questions about a new area: is there enough work, and what will it cost me to find it. This page treats Brussels as its own market: what a lead costs here, how much demand the metro can realistically supply in a year, and which channels are worth the effort at this scale.
What makes this metro its own market is a bilingual auction, so every campaign runs twice and effective volume per language is roughly halved. Everything below, from the lead price to the channel order, follows from it.
The numbers, at a glance
Households in the metro: about 910,000, from a population of roughly 2.1 million people
Projects commissioned annually: an estimated 31,000 to 54,000, or roughly 2,600 to 4,500 enquiries a month across every trade
What an exclusive lead costs: EUR 50 to EUR 185, roughly 25 percent above the Belgian national average
Widest spread between trades: flooring leads at EUR 50 to EUR 85 against solar panel leads at EUR 110 to EUR 185
Proximity and proof decide the map pack here
There is no content trick that beats being close to the searcher with recent reviews. Local ranking in a metro is decided mostly by distance from the point of search, by how many people have reviewed you lately, and by whether your pages describe the actual place. Everything else is a rounding error.
Write at suburb level, not city level. One page per district you genuinely serve, naming streets or neighbourhoods, outranks one page that names Brussels alone.
Make the review request part of handover. A steady trickle of recent reviews beats a large old total, and reviews that mention the district do double duty.
Use your own photographs of local buildings. They convert better than stock images and they give a retrieval engine something concrete to attribute to you.
State the radius and hold it. Every enquiry outside it burns a quote and drags your close rate down, which shows up as a higher cost per signed job even though the lead price never moved.
Running a bilingual funnel without paying for it twice
Every acquisition channel in Brussels exists in two languages, and the two do not behave the same. French carries the larger share of search volume. Dutch carries a smaller audience at a lower cost per click and a noticeably higher close rate for firms that answer the phone in Dutch. The expensive mistake is running one campaign in one language and treating the resulting cost per lead as the Brussels number. Run them as two accounts, judge them separately, and make sure whoever calls back matches the language the enquiry arrived in.
How Belgian homeowners actually shop
The standard behaviour is three written quotes, compared line by line, often with a family member acting as informal adviser. Price is compared but specification differences decide, and the contractor who explains why their quote is higher usually wins over the one who simply is. Structure your quote so it can be compared: same order of items, clearly separated materials and labour, and an explicit list of what is excluded.
How much campaign this metro can carry
There is a ceiling, and it is set by the audience rather than by your budget. With a modelled 31,000 to 54,000 projects a year, Brussels produces roughly 2,600 to 4,500 enquiries a month across every home-improvement trade combined.
Spread across ten trades that is something like 260 to 450 a month in any single specialism, before you subtract the share going to firms that have been here for twenty years. That is the number to plan against, and it is why doubling spend in a small metro raises frequency rather than reach.
Watch frequency rather than impressions. When cost per lead starts climbing without any change in the auction, you have run out of people, not out of money, and the answer is new creative or a wider area rather than a higher bid.
What a signed Brussels customer actually costs
Contractors compare lead prices between cities and draw the wrong conclusion, because the lead is an input and the customer is the output. Here is the output.
Using air conditioning as the worked example: EUR 100 per exclusive lead, 4 to 6 leads for one signature, so roughly EUR 500 of acquisition cost per customer. Set that against a typical project of EUR 5,500 and you are spending about 9.1 percent of the contract to win it.
Now do the same sum with gross margin instead of contract value, because that is the number that pays your overhead. If the figure above is more than a fifth of your margin on the job, the problem is rarely the supplier. It is the time between the enquiry arriving and somebody picking up the phone.
Why an extra twenty minutes of radius costs more than it looks
Widening the service area is the first thing a contractor does when lead flow disappoints, and it is usually the wrong move. A wider radius does bring more enquiries, but it also lowers the number of jobs a crew completes in a week, and the second effect is larger than the first.
Put a number on it. At EUR 55 per crew hour, an extra two hours a day of driving costs EUR 110 a day and about EUR 2,420 over a working month. Against the lead prices on this page, that is the equivalent of throwing away a substantial block of exclusive leads every month in exchange for the privilege of quoting further away.
Before widening, exhaust density instead: more trades sold to the same streets, more reviews in the same suburbs, better conversion on the enquiries you already get. Radius is the last lever to pull, not the first, and it is the only one that permanently raises your cost base.
Apartment blocks, managing agents and the annual meeting
A large share of the Brussels housing stock is apartments in co-owned buildings, which means the roof, the facade, the common heating and the windows on the street side are not the occupant's decision. Those jobs go through the building's managing agent and are voted on at a general meeting that usually happens once a year. Practically: your quote needs to stay valid for twelve months, it needs to be written so a non-technical board can read it, and your pipeline for that segment is measured in years rather than weeks.
What to do with this page
Take the lead price band of EUR 50 to EUR 185 as your ceiling, not your target, and refuse anything above it until you have measured a close rate.
Size your ambition against the pool: an estimated 31,000 to 54,000 projects a year across all trades in Brussels, not per trade and not all winnable.
Choose one trade to start. Flooring is the cheapest entry on this page; solar panel carries the highest ticket.
Get the local search basics right before advertising, because paid channels amplify a conversion rate rather than create one.
Buy exclusive leads to bridge the months while local search matures, then decide on the numbers whether to keep buying.
Set a single number as your target and manage to it: cost per signed customer, benchmarked here at about EUR 500 for air conditioning work.
How these figures were built
These figures are a benchmark model, not a survey. They combine an industry base range observed across Western European home-improvement campaigns with a country multiplier for local auction pressure. Treat them as a band to negotiate against, not a quote. City figures are national bands multiplied by a metro premium, here roughly 25 percent above the Belgian national average. Household counts come from metro population divided by an average household size of 2.3, and the annual pool from an assumed 3.5 to 6 percent of those households commissioning work. Treat all three as estimates to be replaced by your own data once you have it.
How Flock Leads prices this
Leads in Brussels are sold exclusively and priced by volume rather than by trade, so the per-lead cost falls as the block gets larger. Compare the per-lead figures below against the EUR 50 to EUR 185 modelled above for this metro.
Starter - 10 leads for EUR 750, which is EUR 75 per lead
Growth - 25 leads for EUR 1,750, which is EUR 70 per lead
Scale - 45 leads for EUR 2,925, which is EUR 65 per lead
Pro - 70 leads for EUR 4,340, which is EUR 62 per lead
Max - 90 leads for EUR 5,400, which is EUR 60 per lead
No retainer, no contract term, and no lead sent to a second business. Unused volume rolls over under the Flock Lead Promise.
Want leads like this in your pipeline?
Flock runs the campaigns, screens the enquiries and hands you only the ones that match your service area, job size and capacity. You pay per lead, not per month.
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Related answers
Frequently asked questions
How many home-improvement projects happen in Brussels each year?
An estimated 31,000 to 54,000, from a base of roughly 910,000 households. That is across every trade combined, so a single specialism is looking at a fraction of it.
Are purchased leads better than running my own ads here?
They are faster, not cheaper. Purchased exclusive leads give you volume this week at a known price. Your own local search presence is cheaper per lead once it matures but takes months to build. Most contractors in Brussels should run both and let the numbers decide the ratio.
How much does a signed customer actually cost?
Multiply the lead price by the number of leads it takes to close one. For air conditioning work in Brussels that models at about EUR 500 per customer against an average job value of roughly EUR 5,500, or 9.1 percent of revenue.
How far outside Brussels should I advertise?
Set the boundary in minutes rather than kilometres, and measure it at the time of day you actually drive. Widening the radius raises enquiry volume but lowers jobs completed per crew per week, and the second effect is usually the larger one.
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