New-household arithmetic: sizing your marketing to the corridor's growth

Step 1: Start with your own housing count

The Burquitlam-Lougheed Neighbourhood Plan tells you where growth is meant to go: the highest densities near the SkyTrain stations and along North Road, with lower heights further away. It doesn't hand you a yearly number of new homes to plan around, and the current version notes that the 2023/24 provincial Transit Oriented Areas legislation allows more development potential near the stations than the plan's first concepts. So the count has to come from you. For context, the Burquitlam neighbourhood had 25,637 residents at the 2021 Census, summed from four Statistics Canada census tracts.

Build your count from things you can check yourself:

• Occupancy dates. Most developers publish an expected move-in window for each project. Note how many homes each building holds.
• Handovers you can see. Moving trucks, new blinds in the windows and a busy loading bay tell you a building is filling up now.
• Your own records. Count the jobs that came from buildings completed in the last few years, and how many homes those buildings had.

Add up the homes expected to be occupied in your service area over the next twelve months. Then set a low and a high case around that figure. The numbers in this guide are labelled illustrations, so swap in your own:

• Illustration: say 400 new homes a year in your service area. This is an illustration, not a forecast.
• Low year (illustration): say 300 homes, if one building's handover slips into the next year.
• High year (illustration): say 500 homes, if two buildings complete close together.

Burnaby's Lougheed Town Centre adds more homes on the other side of North Road. If your trade works heavily on the Burnaby side, count those buildings as well, or keep them in a separate column so you can see which side of the road pays better.

One important caveat: even a careful count is an estimate. Real completions come in lumps. A year with two towers handing over might bring 700 homes; the next might bring 100. Plan for the range, not the average, and recount every quarter.

Step 2: Estimate how many need your trade

Not every new household needs every trade. The question is what share will need yours, and how soon.

Ask yourself two things:

1. How often does a household in a new suite or townhouse need my service in its first two years?
2. How often after that?

Some example assumptions, which you should replace with your own experience:

These are illustrations, not research findings. The point is to make an assumption explicit, so you can test it against what actually happens.

Step 3: Work out your share of the market

You won't win every customer. Estimate your realistic share of the households that need your trade.

A worked example for a suite painter:

• New homes per year (illustration, not a forecast): 400
• Share needing painting in first 2 years: 12%, so about 48 households over two years, or about 24 a year
• Your realistic share, if you're visible and well reviewed: 25%
• Jobs per year from new households: about 6

That's modest. Now add the effect of repeat and referral work. If each of those customers brings one more job within two years, through a neighbour on the same floor or a second room, you're at about 12 jobs a year. In an illustrative high year of 500 homes, it's closer to 15.

For a move-in cleaner, the same sum gives more: 400 homes × 25% needing cleaning × 25% share = about 25 jobs a year in the illustration, before repeats. Put your own count in place of the 400 and the answer changes in proportion.

Step 4: Set your cost-per-lead ceiling

Next, work out how much you can afford to pay for a lead. You need three numbers:

• Average job value. Say $1,400 for the painter.
• Contribution margin. What's left after labour and materials. Say 35%, or $490.
• Close rate. The share of leads you win. Say 40%.

Your break-even cost per lead is $490 × 0.40 = $196. Spend more than that per lead and you lose money on the first job.

But a customer is worth more than one job. If a typical customer brings one repeat job, their two-year contribution is closer to $980, and you could justify a higher ceiling. We usually set the target well below break-even on the first job, leaving the repeat work as profit.

For the cleaner: $280 job × 35% margin = $98; × 50% close rate = $49 break-even per lead. Much tighter, which is why cleaners lean more on reviews, local search and repeat bookings than on expensive ads.

Step 5: Decide what the numbers justify

Now compare demand with cost.

The painter expects 12 to 15 jobs a year from new households in the illustration, each contributing about $490. That's $5,880 to $7,350 a year in contribution from this source. That alone doesn't justify a large monthly marketing plan. But combined with existing homes in the townhouse and established rings, it might. And the new-household share will grow as more buildings complete.

The cleaner expects 25 or more jobs a year at $98 each: about $2,450, before repeats. If those customers book quarterly cleaning, the value multiplies. Here the arithmetic argues for a strong review routine and local SEO first, with ads only around handovers.

The lesson: new households alone rarely justify a big budget for one small trade. They do justify being ready, with a good profile, a towers page and a plan for each handover, because the cost of being invisible compounds over years.

Step 6: Know when to add capacity

Marketing that works eventually fills your calendar. The arithmetic helps you see that coming.

A simple rule of thumb:

1. Track booked hours per week for three months.
2. If you're consistently above about 85% of capacity, and leads are still arriving, you're turning work away.
3. Check the completion list. If more handovers are due within six months, demand is likely to rise further.
4. That's the point to consider a new crew member, not before.

Hiring ahead of proven demand is the most expensive mistake growing trades make. Hiring too late means losing customers you've already paid to attract.

Common mistakes

• Treating the illustration as a forecast. The 400 homes in this guide are an example. Count the buildings in your own service area, and plan for low and high years.
• Ignoring margin. A $2,000 job with a 15% margin is worth less than a $900 job with 40%.
• Forgetting repeat work. In towers, one good job often leads to neighbours.
• Spending to break-even on the first job. Leave room for our fees, your time and mistakes.
• Treating illustrative percentages as facts. Replace them with your own records as soon as you can.

Using this with us

If you'd like help with the sums, send us your job value, margin and close rate when you call, text or email. We'll redo this arithmetic for your trade and tell you honestly whether paid marketing makes sense. The pricing page shows our plans with a break-even example, corridor-fenced Google Ads explains how ceilings are used in practice, and the plans guide shows how to build the completion list this arithmetic depends on.