Garage Conversion Leads: Qualify by Door Size, Floor and Planning With AI

Give every enquiry the same short intake: garage type, internal size, door opening width and height, floor level against the house, six photos and two planning questions. AI turns the answers into a green, amber or red summary, so the estimator only books a survey with people whose garage can realistically become a room.

A garage conversion looks cheap to the customer because the walls and roof already exist. For the firm, the cost swings on facts that are invisible in an enquiry email: how big the door opening is, what the slab is like, where the services run and whether anything stops the garage losing its original job. Each fact is easy to ask for and expensive to discover on the doorstep. The intake below asks for them in the order that saves most time, and it is deliberately separate from the loft version, which turns on roof structure and head height.

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Why a garage enquiry is not a loft enquiry

If you already screen loft leads, do not reuse the same form. The questions that decide a loft enquiry, such as roof type, head height and budget, say very little about a garage. Garage jobs fail or succeed on a different set of facts, and the table shows how each one changes the price.

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Notice that only two items on that list need a visit to confirm, and four can be asked for in advance. That is the whole case for an intake: it moves the questions that cost nothing to ask in front of the survey, which costs hours.

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Seven intake questions, in the order to ask them

Write the questions as a customer would read them, with a hint on how to answer. The order matters: the easy, factual ones come first so people build momentum before the awkward planning questions.

1. What kind of garage is it? Attached to the house, built into it, or detached; single or double. A detached garage has its own services and foundations, so mark it for a closer look.
2. How big is it inside? Length, width and ceiling height to the nearest 5 cm or 2 inches, measured wall to wall, and what it is used for now.
3. How big is the door opening? Width and height of the opening itself, not the door panel, and the type of door (up-and-over, sectional or roller). Ask them to include a tape in one photo.
4. What is the floor like? The step from the house floor down to the garage floor, measured at the connecting door if there is one; whether the floor slopes towards the door; and any cracks, stains or damp patches.
5. What is in the garage that is not storage? Consumer unit, meter, boiler, water stopcock, pipes or a drain. Photograph each.
6. What will the new room be? Bedroom, home office, gym, utility, or a self-contained space someone could live in. The answer changes the requirements.
7. What do you know about the permissions? Was any condition attached to the original permission, such as keeping the garage or its parking space? Is the house listed, in a protected area, leasehold, or covered by covenants or an association's rules? "I don't know" is a valid answer and gets recorded as such.

Budget and timing sit outside the seven because they route the enquiry rather than describe the garage. Ask them last, as a range ("under $15k, $15k to $30k, over $30k") with a "not sure yet" option. Rephrase the ranges to match your own work, because a customer who sees a band far below your minimum will often drop out without saying why.

Door size: what the opening tells you before anyone visits

The old garage door is the biggest hole in the new room, and the opening has to be filled in with something that works as a wall, usually with a window or a door in it. The width and height tell the estimator how much wall to build, how large a window the customer is dreaming of and whether there will be a structural question above the opening. They do not tell you what is in the wall above, which only a survey shows, but they put the enquiry in the right price band.

Ask for the measurement of the opening, with a tape visible in the photo, because "a normal double door" means different things to different people. An up-and-over door is often taken out as a single unit, while a sectional or roller door has tracks, a box or a motor to remove, so type matters for labour as well as for the infill. If the customer wants a full-height window or a pair of doors in the new front, flag it amber, since that is a design and structural question and not a simple infill.

Floor condition: step, slope, damp and what the slab hides

Garage floors are usually built for cars, not people. The slab may sit below the house floor, may slope to a drain or the door for water, and may have no damp-proofing or insulation beneath it. A converted room needs all of that to be dealt with, and the build-up raises the finished level, so the step in the customer's answer decides whether the new floor will meet the house floor cleanly. Ask for the step in millimetres or inches, measured from the top of the house-side threshold to the garage floor.

Set your own thresholds from your own jobs. As an illustration only, a firm might treat a step under 150 mm (6 inches) with no slope as green, a bigger step or a slope as amber, and standing water, active damp or stepped cracking in the walls as red. Do not copy those figures without checking them against your own build-ups, because the right numbers depend on how you build the floor.

Photos help but do not settle it. A model can describe a dark stain along the base of a wall or a white powder on the concrete, and a person can then decide whether it is old or active. Neither of them can measure moisture from a photograph, so any damp-looking answer should make the enquiry amber at best and trigger a check on site.

Planning and building-rules questions without giving advice

Rules differ by place and by property, so your intake should collect facts and leave the verdict to the survey and the relevant local office. In many places an internal conversion can go ahead without a full planning application under rules sometimes called permitted development, but a condition on the original permission, a covenant or a protected status can take that route away. Building regulations or a building permit are normally a separate matter, because turning a store into a room people use brings in structure, insulation, damp-proofing, ventilation, fire safety and electrics. Treat all of that as a list of things to check, not something the intake decides.

The questions that matter are factual: Is there a condition that the garage or its parking space must remain? Is the property listed, in a protected area, or leasehold? Do covenants or an association's rules cover alterations? Has the customer spoken to the local planning or building office, and what did they say? Record the answer in the customer's words. If a customer asks "do I need planning permission?", the reply should be that it depends on the property and the local rules, that the survey will list what to confirm, and that you cannot confirm permission on their behalf. Telling anyone that no permission is needed is the one sentence your intake must never produce.

Reply template for "Do I need planning permission?":
"It depends on your property and the rules where you are, so I can't confirm that for you.
What I can do is note what you've told me, and our survey will list the points to check
with your local planning and building offices before any work is priced. Could you tell me
whether any condition was attached when the house or garage was built?"

A photo checklist customers can actually follow

People send better photos when each one has a job and a name. Number the six shots in the request and say what each should show.

1. The whole garage from the door end, showing both side walls and the back wall.
2. The whole garage from the back, showing the door and the floor.
3. The door from outside, with the opening and the lintel above it in frame.
4. The door from inside, with a tape across the opening at the width.
5. The floor where it meets the house, with a tape standing on the garage floor against the step.
6. Walls, ceiling and anything on them, including the consumer unit, meter, boiler, pipes and any damp or cracks.

Check the pictures with AI at the intake stage, not at the survey. A multimodal assistant can tell you whether each required view is present, whether it is in focus, and whether a tape is visible, and it can draft a polite request for a retake of any that fail. Claude's help centre, for instance, lists up to 20 files per chat as of November 2026, so a six-photo set fits comfortably. ChatGPT's free plan is tighter: OpenAI's upload FAQ limits free users to three file uploads a day, which one enquiry's photos already exceed, so photo checks at any volume need a paid plan there. Treat the tape reading as a hint only, since a model can misread a number on a blurred tape, and have a person confirm the figures that drive the price.

Keep the privacy side tidy as well. A garage photo set shows the inside of a home, so store it with the enquiry record, not in a personal chat history, and delete photos for declined enquiries after a set period. If the pictures go through a free AI plan, check whether that plan can use them for training and switch that off where it can, or use a business plan that does not train on your content by default.

Sorting answers into green, amber and red

A traffic-light rubric avoids false precision. Score each area on its own, then apply one rule: any red makes the enquiry red, no reds and at most one amber makes it green, and everything else is amber. Adjust the thresholds to your own work. Those in the table are illustrations.

Let the AI apply the rubric and write the summary. It does not tire or skip a question on a busy Monday, though it can still misread an answer, so its summaries get checked against the customer's words. The prompt below pastes in your rubric and the customer's answers, and it forbids the one thing a model must not do here, which is give planning, legal or structural advice.

You screen garage conversion enquiries for a building firm. Use only the customer's
answers and the photos below. Do NOT give planning, legal or structural advice, and never
say anything is allowed or not allowed.

Rubric: [PASTE THE RUBRIC TABLE]
Customer answers: [PASTE THE FORM ANSWERS]
Photos: [ATTACH THE SIX PHOTOS]

Return: (1) a one-line summary; (2) a table with Door, Floor, Services, Planning and Fit,
each marked Green, Amber or Red, with the customer's own words as evidence;
(3) anything missing or unclear; (4) the next step (book survey / ask these questions /
polite decline); (5) a short customer message asking only for the missing items.
Write UNKNOWN for anything not stated. Never guess.

Three enquiries run through the rubric

Here are three illustrative enquiries run through the prompt, to show how the rubric behaves.

Enquiry A goes straight to a survey booking, with a note that the consumer unit will need rerouting. Enquiry B gets an automatic, polite message asking for a tape photo of the opening and for two facts: whether the freeholder allows alterations, and whether the stain is old. If B replies and the ambers resolve, it moves to green. Enquiry C gets a courteous decline that gives the reason and no advice: "We can't take this forward while the condition on the garage is unresolved. If that changes, get in touch and we will pick it up." The reason is the customer's own statement, and you have not judged the law.

Now the sum for a firm that gets 30 enquiries a month. Suppose the intake sorts them into 9 green, 14 amber and 7 red. Before the intake, each enquiry took a 20-minute phone triage, which is 10 hours. With it, the estimator reads 30 three-minute summaries (1.5 hours) and makes 23 ten-minute calls to the green and amber ones (about 3.8 hours), which is about 5.3 hours in all and saves roughly 4.7 hours a month. The bigger saving is the survey visit that does not happen. If three of the seven red enquiries would previously have received a visit at about 2.5 hours each, and an hour of your time costs $45, avoiding them is worth $337.50 a month. All of these figures are illustrative, so rerun them with your own triage times.

What the model gets wrong when it summarises an enquiry

The summary is only useful if the model stays inside the rubric. Here is an illustrative reply for enquiry B, with the kind of slips that occur even when the prompt forbids them.

Summary. Attached single garage, bedroom wanted. Likely suitable for conversion once the floor is damp-proofed. No planning permission should be needed for a bedroom.

Floor: Green. Planning: Green. Door: Amber. Next step: book survey.

Every line of that needs correcting. "Likely suitable for conversion" is a judgement the rubric does not allow, and "No planning permission should be needed" is the forbidden sentence, so both come out. The floor was marked green although the customer said it slopes to the door and the photo shows an old stain, which is amber by your own table, and planning was marked green although the customer said the house is leasehold and has not asked the freeholder. The next step is wrong as a result, because three ambers mean "ask first" and not "book survey". When a model drifts like this, tighten the prompt with an example of a correct reply for an amber case, and add a check line: "For each area, quote the customer's words that justify the colour."

It also helps to run a few of your own past enquiries through the prompt before it goes live. Pick ten that you handled, including two that went badly, paste the original answers and compare the colours with what you would have chosen at the time. If it marks a job you later lost money on as green, find out which answer it should have weighed more heavily, and adjust the rubric. The same method is covered more generally in the tutorial on AI chatbots for qualifying sales leads without pushing, although here a person reads every summary instead of leaving the decision to a chatbot.

Booking the survey, and who pays for it

A green enquiry should leave the intake with a survey booked, not a promise to call. The way you charge for that visit changes who books it, so work the numbers out. A visit that takes 2.5 hours at an internal cost of $45 an hour, plus $20 for fuel, costs $132.50. If one in three surveyed customers goes ahead, each won job carries three visits, or $397.50 of survey cost. A refundable survey fee of $150, credited in full against the job, shifts part of that onto the customer's decision to proceed, and it tends to deter people who were never serious. Others prefer a free visit because it wins more jobs from careful buyers. Pick one, tell the customer in the first message, and measure what happens.

Your garage survey is booked for [day, time]. It takes about two hours and covers
measurements, the floor and walls, the services, and a list of planning and building
points to check. Please clear enough space to reach the walls, and make sure an adult
is home. The survey fee is $[fee], credited in full against your conversion if you go ahead.
Reply to this message to move the date. Reply STOP to opt out of texts.

Chase unconfirmed bookings once, the day before. The window replacement leads tutorial on replying fast and booking the survey has a close cousin of this step, since window firms face the same gap between an enquiry and a visit. If the survey goes ahead and the customer wants a price, the structure in the loft conversion quote template with stages and provisional sums carries across, because both jobs hide unknowns that should be priced as provisional sums and not as guesses.

Setting it up with a form, a chat or WhatsApp

The intake can live in a web form, a chat widget or a messaging thread. Choose the one your customers already use, and note the limits of each before you build anything.

• A form on your site. Best for structured answers and the six photos. Check the maximum file size, since phone photos are often several megabytes each.
• A Google Form. Free and fast, with one catch for photos: Google says responders must sign in to a Google account to answer a file upload question, and the files land in a folder in the form owner's Drive. Many homeowners will stop at the sign-in, so use it for the questions and collect the photos some other way.
• A chat or messaging thread. Whether it runs on your website or in a messaging app such as WhatsApp, customers find it natural to send photos, and the AI can ask the next question and request retakes. The cost is that answers arrive unstructured, so have the AI extract them into the rubric fields. The tutorial on qualifying website leads with a chatbot and handing them over covers that handover.

Whatever you choose, the AI step stays an assistant. It reads the answers, applies the rubric, drafts the summary and the reply, and a person approves every decline and every survey booking for the first month. A decline sent in error costs a job, and a survey wrongly booked costs half a day, so the approval step pays for itself. If your question flow resembles another trade's, the solar installer chatbot for qualifying leads shows a parallel build. Set the budget bands in your own intake from your own past jobs, not from anyone else's figures.

Questions about screening garage conversion enquiries

Do I need to know the planning rules to qualify leads?

You need the right questions, not the answers. Ask about conditions on the original permission, covenants, protected status and the intended use, record what the customer says, and tell them the survey will list what to confirm with the relevant local office. Never tell a customer they do not need permission.

Can AI tell from photos whether a garage floor is damp?

No. A model can describe visible staining, cracks and efflorescence and can tell you a photo is blurred or missing a tape, but it cannot measure moisture or find its cause. Treat any damp description as a reason to flag the enquiry amber or red and to check on site.

Should the survey visit be free or paid?

Either can work. Work out the cost of a visit (travel, two or three hours, report) and how many surveyed customers go ahead. A refundable survey fee credited against the job filters out casual enquiries, while a free visit suits firms with a high win rate. Tell customers up front which you use.

How many photos should I ask for?

Six is a workable ceiling: the garage from the door, from the back, the door from inside and outside, the floor where it meets the house, and the walls and ceiling with any services. Fewer will miss problems, and asking for many more tends to lose customers before they finish the form.

Further reads

• Garage Door Repair Chatbot: Capture Door Type, Fault and Photos — Capture door type, fault and photos in a chat before a visit.
• Garage Door Leads: Qualify and Answer Them Faster With AI — A different garage job: qualifying door repair and replacement calls.
• Renovation Quote Template: Room-by-Room Scope Written With AI — Turn a qualified enquiry into a room-by-room quote.
• ChatGPT for Builders: Ten Prompts for Quotes, Chasers and Client Emails — Ten prompts for quotes, chasers and client emails.
• Damp Survey Report: Write Findings and Quote Lines With AI — Write up damp findings once the survey visit confirms them.
• Insulation Leads: What They Cost and How AI Qualifies Them — How another building-fabric trade qualifies leads and sets budget bands.
• AI Tools and AI Development: The Complete 2026 Guide — the AI hub, including every tutorial in the AI-for-business series.

Sources: Google Docs Editors Help on file upload questions in Google Forms, OpenAI's file-upload FAQ, and Claude's help-centre page on uploading files. Planning and building rules differ by place, so check them with the relevant local office.