Did anyone else get burned by a geo-fencing vendor promising hyper-local seller leads?

The intent-signal premise is real but the execution gap is enormous, and what you described is almost exactly what happens when the vendor is reselling audience segments they bought wholesale rather than actually building a custom geofence around those specific locations in your zip codes. I ran a test on something adjacent in Q3 last year, not Columbus but a Midwest suburban market, targeting people who had physically entered self-storage facilities within a 12-mile radius of our highest-turnover properties. Paid $3,100 for eight weeks, got 21 form fills, and the operator I handed them to said roughly the same thing you said: a third uncontactable, a handful confused, one agent. The two that were real were people already on our direct mail list anyway. What I think is happening is the device ID matching is messy at the physical location level, so the audience you're actually reaching is anyone whose phone GPS put them within 200 meters of a storage facility at any point, which in a dense suburb is a lot of people who just parked nearby or drove past. The signal degrades fast.

The portability thing you mentioned at the end is the real lesson I had to learn the expensive way. When the audience data, the pixel, and the creative all sit in their platform, you are not building anything, you are renting eyeballs for six weeks and then starting from zero. I now will not run any paid campaign where I do not own the pixel outright, the CRM integration is direct, and the audience list gets exported to me in a format I can actually use. That condition alone eliminates probably 60 percent of the vendors I have talked to, which tells you something about what most of them are actually selling.

Paid $3,100 for almost identical garbage in Akron, same estate sale foot traffic pitch.