PropStream Pricing for Roofers: What It Costs and What It Misses

PropStream is a property-data platform. It was built for investors hunting distressed houses, and it is genuinely good at that job. It carries ownership records, mortgage history, equity estimates, tax delinquency, foreclosure flags, and a skip-trace engine that turns a mailing address into a phone number.

Roofers keep signing up for it anyway. The logic sounds right: it is cheap per month, it has every house in the county, and it will hand you the owner's phone number. Then they open it, filter for a neighbourhood they already work, and realise they are looking at a spreadsheet of houses with no idea which ones need a roof. That is the gap, and it is a wide one.

Here is what PropStream pricing actually looks like, what the bill really is, and what a roofer has to layer on top of it.

1. What PropStream pricing looks like

PropStream does not publish a simple public rate card the way a SaaS tool does. What contractors report and what the company's own signup flow shows is a subscription model with tiers, quoted monthly, with an annual discount, and a separate meter for skip tracing.

As of writing, the structure looks like this:

• A base subscription, billed monthly or annually, that unlocks the property records, the search filters, the list export, and the map. Contractors report the entry tier landing somewhere in the range of a cheap streaming service and the top tier climbing past a hundred dollars a month. The tiers mostly govern how many records you can pull and how much export volume you get, not which fields you can see.
• A skip-trace credit meter. This is the part that surprises people. Skip tracing is not included in the base subscription. You buy credits, and each credit traces one property to a phone number and email. Bulk traces burn credits fast. In practice, a roofer who pulls a 500-home list and traces all of it is spending real money on top of the subscription, and the credits do not roll over forever.
• Add-ons and data upsells. PropStream sells ancillary data products and lead lists on top of the core subscription. Some are useful to investors. Almost none are useful to a roofer.

The honest summary: the subscription is cheap, and the skip-trace meter is where the money goes. If you are comparing PropStream to a pay-per-lead marketplace, PropStream wins easily on cost. If you are comparing it to a tool that tells you which roofs need work, PropStream is not in the same category.

If you want to understand how the same subscription-plus-credits shape plays out across the other investor-data tools roofers get pitched, we broke down what DealMachine costs and where it stops short, and the pattern is identical.

2. What PropStream is actually good at

Give credit where it is due. PropStream's property records are strong.

• Owner name and mailing address, including absentee and out-of-state owners.
• Estimated market value and equity position.
• Last sale date and price, mortgage lender, and loan history.
• Tax delinquency, foreclosure stage, and lien activity.
• Beds, baths, square footage, lot size, year built.
• Bulk list building with filters on all of the above.

For an investor looking for a pre-foreclosure with equity, that is a complete toolkit. For a roofer, most of those fields are background noise. You do not care that the owner is 40% leveraged. You care that the shingles on the south plane are curling and the house next door just got a new roof.

3. The field PropStream does not carry

Here is the whole problem in one sentence: PropStream has no idea what the roof looks like.

There is no roof condition field. No roof age read off the shingles. No material, no plane count, no pitch, no visible tarp, no missing shingles, no hail bruising, no neighbour comparison. The year-built field is not a proxy — a 1978 house can have a 2019 roof, and a 2005 house can have the original builder-grade shingles failing right now. If you filter PropStream by year built to find old roofs, you will knock a street where half the houses were re-roofed after the last hail event and you will not know it until you are standing on the porch.

That is the same trap as ranking a neighbourhood from a stale aerial photo. We wrote about why a nine-year-old image sends you to doors that were re-roofed years ago, and the fix is the same: read the newer picture before you drive.

The second thing PropStream does not do is compare a roof to its neighbours. A roof only means something next to the roofs either side of it. If the two houses flanking your target have both gone new and this one has not, that is the strongest social proof in the trade and it is completely invisible in a property-record database.

4. What a roofer has to layer on top

If you are running PropStream as your prospecting base, here is the honest stack.

Condition, from imagery. Something has to read the roof itself. That is what Roofbird's imagery scoring does: a top-down overhead tile and a ground-level Street View of the façade read together into one assessment, with the capture date of each image shown so you know whether you are looking at a 2025 photo or a 2016 one. It catches granule loss, algae streaking, curling shingles, patched sections, and rusted flashing that a top-down tile alone misses.

Neighbour ranking. Each roof gets placed against the roofs either side of it — replace-now, worn, midlife, or already done — plus a plain-English verdict in a roofer's words.

A NEED score and a NOW score, kept separate. NEED is how badly the roof needs replacing. NOW is whether anything is forcing a decision on this specific house: a visible tarp, missing shingles, exposed decking, hail damage on this roof, a recent purchase, patching already attempted, or neighbours who have re-roofed. Neighbourhood hail deliberately does not raise the NOW score, because every home in the scan shares it and it cannot separate one door from the next.

Owner contact details, DNC-scrubbed. This is where the PropStream comparison gets sharp. PropStream will sell you a skip-trace credit and hand you a phone number. It will not tell you whether that number is on the federal Do Not Call registry. Roofbird's homeowner contact details and DNC screening label every number as clear, DNC, or verify, so you know before you dial whether a manual sales call is safe. Manual dialling only — no texts, no auto-dialler. And a lookup that finds no contact never costs a credit.

The full property record — owner name, occupancy, value, year built, last sale, beds, baths, lot, taxes, lender, and an owner-equity estimate — shows free on every lead as soon as it is scanned. Only the phone and email sit behind a one-click unlock. That is the inverse of the PropStream model, where the records are the subscription and the contacts are the meter.

5. The cost comparison nobody runs

Run the actual math on a month of prospecting.

PropStream subscription, say the mid tier. Plus skip-trace credits on a 400-home list — call it 400 credits at whatever the current per-credit rate is. Plus your time filtering a database for a condition field that does not exist, then driving to doors that turn out to be already done.

The last line is the expensive one. A morning is measured in doors per hour, and a wasted morning costs more than any subscription. We laid out the real numbers on what homeowner contact data actually costs per usable lead, and the pattern holds: the cheap data is cheap because it does not tell you which door to knock.

Roofbird's own pricing is one meter. Looking is free and unlimited — asking questions, searching roofs already read, sorting, saving lists, scanning new ground and ranking every roof in it, at any size. Acting costs credits. Reading a roof properly — both photographs and the full property record in one go — is 1 credit per 8 roofs. Owner name, phone and email is 1 credit per 2 roofs. Opening a house completely is 1 credit. The trial is 10 credits, free, no card, no expiry. Hunter is $199/mo for 350 credits, Hunter Pro is $499/mo for 1,000. Full detail is on the pricing page.

6. When PropStream is the right buy

Be fair about this. PropStream is the right tool if you are buying distressed property, flipping, or wholesaling. It is the right tool if you need foreclosure and lien data. It is a reasonable secondary source for owner mailing addresses if you already have a condition-first system and want to cross-reference.

It is the wrong primary tool for a roofing contractor whose whole job is finding houses that need a roof and getting in front of the owner. You would be paying a subscription for fields you do not use and a skip-trace meter for numbers with no DNC label, on top of a database that cannot tell a new roof from a 20-year-old one.

7. What to do this week

1. If you have a PropStream subscription, pull your last export and count how many of those houses you actually knocked. That ratio is your real cost per door.
2. Pick one ZIP you work and ask a plain-English question about the roofs in it — the worst roofs, the ones with a tarp, the ones where the neighbours have already gone new. Looking is free.
3. Compare the list you get against the PropStream list for the same ZIP. Count the overlap. The houses that show up on one and not the other tell you which tool is doing the work.
4. Before you dial anything, check the DNC label. Manual calls only.
5. If you are already holding a CRM full of leads, score what is in it before you buy another list.

PropStream is not a bad product. It is a product built for a different job. A roofer needs the condition of the roof, the neighbours either side of it, and a phone number he is allowed to call. PropStream carries none of the first two and sells you the third without the scrub.

FAQ

Q: How much does PropStream cost for a roofing contractor? A: PropStream does not publish a simple public rate card; it sells a monthly or annual subscription with tiers, plus a separate skip-trace credit meter for phone numbers and emails. Contractors report the base subscription landing in the low-to-mid double digits per month and climbing past a hundred for higher tiers, with skip-trace credits billed on top. The subscription is cheap; the trace meter is where the money goes.

Q: Does PropStream show roof condition? A: No. PropStream carries property records, ownership, mortgage, equity, tax and foreclosure data. It has no roof condition field, no roof age read from the shingles, no material, plane count, or visible damage, and no neighbour comparison. The year-built field is not a proxy, because a 1978 house can have a 2019 roof.

Q: Does PropStream skip tracing include DNC screening? A: Skip tracing returns a phone number and email; it does not label whether the number is on the federal Do Not Call registry. Roofbird's homeowner contact lookup labels every number as clear, DNC, or verify, and is built for manual sales calls only — no texting and no auto-dialling.

Q: Can I use PropStream and Roofbird together? A: Yes, and some contractors do: PropStream as a record source, Roofbird as the condition and contact layer. The overlap is small enough that most roofers drop the PropStream subscription once they see which list actually produces doors, because Roofbird's full property record shows free on every lead and only the phone and email sit behind a credit.