The Home-Service Reachability Study: 202,208 Listings, 8 Trades, One Uncomfortable Finding (2026)

Key findings

From 202,208 home-service listings across 8 trades in 400+ high-income US cities: 81.2% of rated businesses with no website hold 4.5★ or better (avg 4.68); fewer than half of trades websites yield a usable email (35.8% publish none, and 26.9% of found addresses are junk); 19.5% of no-website listings don't even carry a dialable phone number; and 56% of validated plumber phone lines in the no-website pool run on VoIP or toll-free infrastructure.

Over the past months we scraped and cleaned every Google business listing we could find for eight home-service trades — plumbing, HVAC, electrical, roofing, pest control, tree removal, junk removal, garage door repair — across more than 400 of America’s highest-income cities. Not a survey, not a sample poll: 202,208 raw listings, deduplicated to 90,936 unique phone-reachable businesses.

We collected it to run our own outreach. But the aggregate picture was interesting enough to publish, because it answers a question homeowners and the industry keep asking from opposite directions: how reachable is the average home-service business, really?

The answer: much less reachable than their review scores deserve.

---

Finding 1: The invisible businesses are the good ones

The lazy assumption about a contractor with no website is that they’re marginal — a side hustle, a fading operation. The data says otherwise.

Among the 18,770 no-website listings in our dataset, 14,816 carried a Google rating. Their average: 4.68 stars. The share rated 4.5 or higher: 81.2% (12,035 businesses).

For comparison, the with-website pool averaged 4.78 — a difference of a tenth of a star. The no-website businesses are not meaningfully worse-reviewed; they are simply absent from the channel where homeowners now start every search. Four out of five of them are doing excellent work for the customers who manage to find them — by referral, by truck signage, by being in the neighborhood twenty years.

The web is not filtering for quality. It is filtering for web presence, and discarding thousands of 4.5-star businesses in the process.

Finding 2: Fewer than half of trades websites can actually receive an email lead

Having a website turns out to be a low bar for being contactable through one. We ran a deterministic email scrub across the 134,352-listing with-website pool. The result:

Email status	Share of listings
No discoverable email at all	35.8%
Clean email on the business’s own domain	28.7%
Free-mail address (gmail, yahoo, etc.)	18.3%
Address belongs to a different business	10.0%
Template placeholder (e.g. email@example.com)	4.2%
Asset filename or telemetry endpoint scraped into the email field	3.0%

Add it up: only 47% of home-service listings with websites yield any sendable email address, and barely 29% publish a clean one on their own domain. One in ten “contact emails” we found belonged to somebody else’s business entirely — web designers’ template artifacts, shared office managers, defunct franchises.

If a homeowner — or a commercial lead, or a supplier — tries to email the average trades business, the message most often has nowhere to go.

Finding 3: One in five no-website businesses can’t reliably be called either

Of the no-website listings, 19.5% (3,664 of 18,770) carried no dialable US phone number at all — the field was empty, malformed, or not a valid ten-digit number. (A wider pass across our full multi-niche dataset found the same rate: 18.4% of 45,698 rows.)

Think about what that means: these businesses have no website and no callable number on their listing. They exist in Google’s index as a name and an approximate location. A homeowner who finds them cannot contact them by any digital means whatsoever.

Finding 4: The phone infrastructure tells its own story

For a validated subset — 818 plumbing businesses from the no-website pool whose lines we ran through carrier lookup — the line types broke down like this: 56% (458 lines) ran on VoIP or toll-free infrastructure, versus 36% mobile and 8% landline.

VoIP and toll-free numbers on a small trades business usually indicate an answering service, a call center, or a lead-generation intermediary already sitting between the caller and the owner. Even among businesses with no website, most callers are not reaching the person who does the work — they’re reaching whatever call-handling layer the owner bolted on. (Caveat: this subset is plumbing-only and was validated for our own dialing purposes; treat it as indicative, not a census.)

Two smaller data-hygiene findings worth noting: 6,045 phone numbers appeared under more than one trade category (shared call centers, franchises, and lead-gen numbers wearing multiple hats), and 8,601 numbers appeared on both a with-website and a no-website listing — duplicate and inconsistent Google listings for the same business are routine.

---

What this means (three audiences)

If you’re a homeowner: the star rating is real, but the contact infrastructure behind it often isn’t. The 4.7-star plumber who never answers isn’t ignoring you — there’s frequently no working channel between their listing and their pocket.

If you write about the trades: the “digital divide” in home services is not a quality divide. The most striking number in this dataset is 81.2% — the share of no-website businesses rated 4.5★+. Feel free to cite it (see below).

If you own a trades business: your competition’s front door is, statistically, broken — half their websites can’t take an email, a fifth of the offline shops can’t take a call. Being reliably reachable — answering, booking, texting back — is a smaller advantage to build than a brand, and this data suggests it’s rarer. (That’s the business we’re in: a fast website plus an AI receptionist that answers and books 24/7. But the numbers above are true whether or not you buy anything from us.)

---

Methodology

• Collection: Google business listings scraped during 2026 for eight trades — plumbing, HVAC, electrical, roofing, pest control, tree removal, junk removal, garage door repair — across 400+ US cities selected by Census household-income data (our target market skews to higher-income metros; treat all findings as describing wealthy-city home services, not rural America).
• Volume: 202,208 raw listings → 90,936 unique businesses after phone-number deduplication.
• Email analysis: deterministic, offline scrub of the 134,352-row with-website pool (regex + domain-ownership checks; no paid verification involved in these figures). Classes: none / own-domain match / free-mail / wrong-business mismatch / placeholder / asset-or-telemetry junk.
• Line-type analysis: carrier lookup on an 818-line plumbing subset. Flagged as indicative only.
• What we deliberately did NOT claim: any “X% of businesses have no website” figure. Our two scrape pools had different sampling frames, so that ratio would be an artifact of our collection, not a fact about the market. Where our data can’t support a number, we don’t print one.

Cite this study

Cite as “Titan Pipelines Home-Service Reachability Study, 2026” with a link to this page. Journalists and researchers: if you need a per-trade or per-metro cut, contact us — we’ll run it from the raw data at no charge.

---

Titan Pipelines builds websites and AI phone receptionists for home-service trades. This dataset started life as our prospect research; the aggregate findings are published here because reachability — not quality — turned out to be the industry’s real bottleneck. Related: how plumbers lose 6–8 calls a week, what an answering service costs.