ABI construction leads: what you get, what it costs, and what else works

What Barbour ABI sells

Barbour ABI aggregates UK construction project intelligence from planning applications, building regulations and industry sources. Its core offer is a database of projects enriched with contact details (project manager, architect, main contractor, sometimes the client), along with project value estimates, programme stages and sector filters. The idea is that a regional sales manager at a brick or insulation manufacturer can pull a list of £500K to £5M residential projects in their patch, see who's specifying, and get in touch before the order goes out.

That enrichment is what you're paying for. The underlying planning data is public: every local planning authority (LPA) in England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland publishes an application register. What Barbour ABI adds on top is a research team that phones sites, verifies contacts and attaches names and roles to projects. That human layer takes time and money to produce, which is why the platform sits at enterprise prices.

It also tracks how a project moves through its stages, from tender to contract award to work starting on site. For a cladding or M&E subcontractor that needs to quote at the right moment, that timing can matter as much as the initial lead.

What Barbour ABI costs, and how it's sold

Barbour ABI does not publish pricing. Contracts are negotiated directly with a sales team, and the cost varies with the number of users, the sectors and regions you cover, and the data modules included. It isn't public, but it runs from several thousand to tens of thousands of pounds a year, on a par with Glenigan. Both are built for teams with a dedicated business development function and a budget to match.

The sales process is gated. You can request a demo, but there's no self-serve trial and no published tier you can start using today. For an owner-managed groundworks firm with three estimators, or a regional timber merchant with one person covering new business, that process can feel disproportionate to the size of the spend they're considering.

None of that is a knock on the model. It suits national contractors, large merchants and manufacturers with structured sales teams. It does mean, though, that the product isn't built for every business with a legitimate use for construction lead data.

Where planning applications fit into the picture

Barbour ABI's project data starts, in most cases, with a planning application. A developer submits plans to their local authority, and the application appears on the public register with a description, site address, applicant name and agent. Everything that comes after that, the verified contacts, decision tracking and programme dates, is the value Barbour ABI layers on top.

That makes the planning application itself an early signal, often appearing weeks or months before a project reaches any paid database. A full approval for 48 homes in Derbyshire sits on the council's planning portal well before a research team packages it into a lead. If you're a roofing materials supplier or a scaffolding contractor, the day the application is validated is when you want to know about it, not two months later.

Government planning statistics, published quarterly by the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government (MHCLG), show tens of thousands of planning decisions issued in England alone each quarter, across residential, commercial and infrastructure schemes. Most of those projects never appear in a Barbour ABI sales list. They are smaller, more regional, or too slow-moving for a research team to prioritise.

The gap that self-serve tools fill

For a specialist subcontractor working a 30-mile radius, or a materials supplier with a handful of regional reps, the case for Barbour ABI is harder to make. You would be paying for national coverage and verified contacts when what you actually need is narrower: every planning application of a given type in your area, as soon as it's validated, so you can make contact yourself.

SiteLens covers 380+ UK councils, pulls new applications daily, and uses AI to classify each one by type, trade relevance, scale and estimated value, with a plain-English brief on every scheme. You can save an alert for, say, commercial new-builds above a certain size within 25 miles of Birmingham and get a daily digest of the matches. There's no research team attaching named decision-makers to each project. What you get is the planning signal early, with enough context to decide whether a scheme is worth chasing.

The pricing sits in a different bracket. SiteLens starts free on the Explorer tier (full map access and one saved alert), rises to £29/mo billed annually for Pro, and £79/mo billed annually for a Team plan that adds hourly alerts, up to 5 users and larger exports. That is a long way from an enterprise planning contract, and for a lot of SME contractors and regional suppliers it covers what they actually need.

When Barbour ABI is still the better call

If your sales team needs pre-verified contact names, project values confirmed by quantity surveyors, and stage-by-stage tracking across a national pipeline, Barbour ABI or Glenigan is probably worth the conversation. That human-verified layer is expensive to build and maintain, and no self-serve tool replicates it exactly.

Large materials manufacturers with dedicated specification managers, national framework subcontractors, or companies running high-volume outbound business development are the natural users. For them, the cost of a bad contact or a missed tender window is higher than the annual subscription.

In practice, the two tools answer different questions. Barbour ABI is strongest on who the decision-makers are once a project is heading to site. SiteLens is built to flag what has just been submitted or approved in your area, and where. Both start from planning data, and which one you need comes down to where in your sales process you want the intelligence.

How to use planning data as a lead source in practice

Whether you use Barbour ABI, SiteLens, or a combination of both, the approach is similar. Start with application type and geography. For a groundworks subcontractor, that might mean filtering for residential major applications and commercial full applications within your operating radius. For a window manufacturer's regional rep, it could be any new-build residential application above a unit threshold.

The validation date matters more than the decision date for early outreach. An application validated today has a statutory target of 8 weeks for most types and 13 weeks for major schemes, though in practice plenty run longer (MHCLG publishes decision-speed figures broken down by application type). That gap is your window to reach the architect, developer or main contractor before the specification is fixed.

Once you have the application, the applicant and agent are named on the public register. Companies House records fill in a lot of the rest: registered address, directors and related companies. SiteLens matches Companies House numbers on every application for free, and its paid plans add agent contact details where published, a Find contacts lookup and property history, which shortens that step. It stops short of handing you a direct phone number, but it gets you to the right company fast.

Practical next steps

If you're weighing up whether Barbour ABI is worth the investment, the most useful first step is to spend time with the free planning data directly, either through individual council portals or a platform like SiteLens that aggregates them. That shows you how much volume actually exists in your area and sectors, which is the number that decides whether a bigger paid tool would pay for itself.

The SiteLens Explorer tier is free with no card required: the full map, search across 380+ UK councils and one saved alert. It's a sensible way to sense-check the pipeline in your patch before committing to any paid subscription, whether that's SiteLens Pro or an enterprise contract with one of the larger providers.