78% of Buyers Go With the First Responder. How Fast Is Your Quote?

78% of homeowners buy from the first contractor who sends a quote.

Not the best contractor. Not the cheapest. The fastest.

That number should bother you. Because right now, while you’re working through your backlog of leads with a spreadsheet and a calculator, a competitor is answering the same enquiry with a price in their hands.

The math is brutal

The average outdoor living contractor handles around 170 bids per year. At two hours each, that’s 340 hours of unpaid quoting time every season. One full month of working hours, given away for free, to prospects who may or may not buy.

But here’s what makes it worse: 82% of homeowners expect a response within 10 minutes of making an enquiry. Not within a business day. Within ten minutes.

That’s not a typo.

So picture the scene. A homeowner fills out your contact form at 7pm on a Tuesday. You’re finishing dinner. You’ll get to it tomorrow morning. You open your laptop at 8am Wednesday, pull out your plans, fire up the spreadsheet, and start piecing the quote together. By 11am you’ve got something solid. You hit send.

By the time you hit send, someone else has already landed the job.

Not because their pergola is better or because their price is lower. Because they got there first.

Speed is a competitive advantage, not just efficiency

There’s a phrase you’ll hear in contractor forums, and it’s completely true: “Some people will just take the bid that can get to it the quickest.”

That’s not laziness on the homeowner’s part. It’s how buying decisions actually work. When someone decides they want a new pergola or garden room, that decision has a short emotional half-life. The longer the gap between “I want this” and “I have a price and a plan in front of me,” the more the excitement cools. The more they start second-guessing. The more a faster competitor fills the gap.

Research backs this up consistently. The contractor who sends the first accurate quote wins roughly 50% more often than those who follow up later. First accurate. Not first rough estimate, not first ballpark. First real number.

The good news: this is a race most of your competitors are also losing. Manual quoting keeps everyone slow. The contractor who figures out how to quote faster gains an asymmetric advantage, because the bar is that low.

What 340 hours actually costs you

Think about what those 340 unpaid hours represent.

At a conservative estimate of your own time value, it’s money you’re not billing. But the hidden cost is bigger than that. It’s the leads who emailed three other companies the same night and went with whoever called back first. It’s the quote you spent two hours building that went cold because the homeowner “decided to wait.” It’s the late nights at the kitchen table with a stack of plans, a calculator and a cup of cold coffee, doing work that never shows up in your revenue.

The more leads come in, the more hours disappear. Until quoting becomes the ceiling on what your business can do.

What fixing this looks like in practice

That’s not hours redirected from other tasks. Those are hours that used to disappear into spreadsheets and are now available for selling, installing, or going home before 9pm.

More importantly: every one of those 331 customers got a real price fast. No waiting. No “I’ll get back to you.” An instant, accurate quote the moment they finished configuring their product.

That’s what the 78% stat looks like when you’re on the right side of it.

The other side of the quoting problem

Speed isn’t the only way slow quoting costs you. The 340 hours of quoting pain is made worse by the fact that a significant portion of those quotes go to leads who were never going to buy.

Tire-kickers. The homeowners who are “just getting an idea of prices.” The ones who’ll request three or four estimates and then do nothing. We’ll cover the full cost of that problem, and how to filter it out before you ever pick up a calculator, in a separate post. But it’s worth noting: the combination of slow quoting and high tire-kicker volume is what makes the math so punishing for most contractors.

Solve the speed problem and you’ve won back significant time. Solve both, and you’ve changed what your business can do.

How to quote faster as a contractor

The fastest path to faster quoting isn’t hiring someone to do it for you. That just moves the bottleneck.

It’s giving customers the ability to configure their own product and generate their own accurate price, before they ever speak to you. A visual configurator on your website handles the initial scope and pricing. By the time a lead contacts you, they already have a number and a 3D render. Your job is to close the deal, not build the estimate from scratch.

That’s the difference between YourPergola’s 166 hours saved per month and the contractor still at the kitchen table at midnight.