The category, defined
Well completion report leads are new water-well households identified from the public reports well drillers are required to file with their state — the address of a property that just got a private well, taken from the government record of the well itself rather than from a form the homeowner filled out.
When a licensed driller finishes a domestic water well, the state requires a report of it: the property address, the depth, the yield, the completion date, the driller’s licence. The state then publishes that report in a public database. This is not marketing data — it is the regulatory paper trail of the well itself, and it exists for every legal well whether or not anyone ever tries to sell the household anything.
Each state publishes its own file, under its own name:
| State | Where the reports are published |
|---|---|
| California | California DWR — Well Completion Reports (OSWCR) |
| Florida | Florida water management district well construction permits |
| Michigan | Michigan EGLE — Wellogic |
| Minnesota | Minnesota Department of Health — Minnesota Well Index |
| Texas | Texas Water Development Board — Submitted Driller’s Reports (SDR) |
| Wisconsin | Wisconsin DNR — Groundwater Retrieval Network |
One state is different by construction: Florida’s water management districts publish the well construction permit, issued before the hole is drilled — so a Florida record describes a household that is about to be on well water, not one that already is. Some permits are never drilled, and nobody publishes how many. Every other state above publishes the completed well.
A household that just moved onto a private well became responsible for its own water overnight, with no municipal utility treating it first. Whether that water is hard is a fact about local groundwater, and it is checkable: state and federal agencies publish laboratory chemistry for wells by location, so a new well can be matched against measured samples from wells nearby. Where the surrounding groundwater is hard, the new household on it is the most timely prospect this industry has — identified by a government filing, not by guesswork about a neighborhood.
A shared inbound lead is somebody who asked. They filled out a form, so they have intent — and so does every competitor the platform resold the same form to. A completion report lead is the reverse: nobody asked. The household has not expressed interest in treatment; what you know is that their well is real, new, and on groundwater whose chemistry is public record. There is no intent signal, and in exchange the record is not being auctioned to four other companies.
That trade cuts one more way, and it decides who this category fits. These records carry no phone number, and appending one from a data broker turns a public record into a cold-call list: solicitation calls to numbers on the National Do Not Call Registry carry statutory damages of $500 per call under the TCPA (47 U.S.C. § 227), trebled for wilful violations, before state law is counted. Mail and a door knock have no equivalent registry. Completion report leads suit the way this industry already sells — in-home tests and doorstep visits — and fit a phone-room operation badly. That is a real limit of the category, not a footnote.
| Model | What you get | The trade-off |
|---|---|---|
| Shared inbound platforms | A homeowner who filled out a form, priced per lead and typically resold to several companies at once. | Real intent, shared with your competitors — the race to the phone decides who wins the job. |
| Marketing agencies | Ads and SEO run on your behalf, on retainer, generating inbound that is yours alone. | Paid whether or not it works, and the results depend on ad markets you and the agency control only partly. |
| Records-derived (this category) | Addresses of new wells from state filings, qualified with public chemistry, exclusive to whoever holds the territory. | No intent signal, no phone numbers, and the filing clock is the driller’s — you reach out, they didn’t. |
The lag between a well being finished and the report reaching the state’s file belongs to the driller and the state, not to whoever reads it. Texas, for example, gives drillers sixty days to file. A feed built on completion reports can publish within a day of a report appearing — but it cannot beat the filing itself, and any vendor claiming otherwise is describing a different data source. Florida’s permits invert this: the record precedes the well. The measured lag figures for every state we publish are on the methodology page, from the same data that builds the feed.
Yes. The completion files are free public downloads — that is the point of them, and any vendor in this category who implies otherwise is overselling. What is not free is the work on top: the water chemistry lives in separate databases keyed to coordinates, matching it to each new well is the join, and reading every state’s file weekly is a habit that has to survive your busy season. A records-derived feed is priced against that work, not against access to the records.
Hard Water Feed is the records-derived model, run weekly: new domestic wells from the states above, qualified by measured hardness from public laboratory samples, sold to one water-treatment business per territory. The territory grid shows every territory, its measured volume and its price; what arrives shows a delivery; and the methodology publishes every number’s computation, because the reader this page was written for is exactly the reader who should check our arithmetic.
Last updated 2026-09-08. Written and maintained by Hard Water Feed — we sell in this category, and the trade-offs above apply to us too.