It's tempting to think a competitor's address tells you where it competes. It doesn't. In my Tulsa Trade Clusters research, I pulled Census Bureau business counts by ZIP code for Tulsa County and compared them to population. The clusters don't sit where the people do.
What the Data Shows
One caveat first: the Census category I used combines plumbing and HVAC contractors, so it can't separate the two. The counts come from the Census Bureau's County Business Patterns for 2023, and population comes from the American Community Survey 5-Year Estimates for 2022.
- ZIP 74116 in Tulsa has the highest per-capita cluster: 6 establishments, or 18.10 per 10,000 residents. The ZIP has only 3,315 residents.
- ZIP 74145 in Tulsa is second per capita, with 10.09 per 10,000 residents, and has more establishments in total: 19.
- 25 of Tulsa County's 33 ZIPs had a usable published figure for this category. The rest were too small for the Census to publish, which does not mean zero.
Why the Address Isn't the Service Area
A ZIP with 3,315 residents can't hold the customer base of six HVAC companies. Those companies are there for other reasons. My reading is that shop space and access matter more than where homeowners live, but that's an interpretation, not something the Census data proves. What is certain is that their trucks drive to customers across the metro.
What This Means For Your Ads
- Don't judge a competitor's reach by its address. A shop based in one ZIP can be advertising in Broken Arrow, Bixby and Owasso.
- Target the suburbs you actually serve, not the ZIP where you park the trucks. I cover how demand moves through those suburbs in HVAC demand by suburb.
- Check the map, not the address. Search "ac repair" from inside each suburb and see who shows up. That's the competition your customers actually see.
How I Built It, and Where It Stops
I matched ZIP code areas to Tulsa County using the Census Bureau's own 2020 relationship file, which gave me 33 ZIPs, then queried the Census API directly. Because the numbers come live from the API, anyone can re-run the same query and check them.
The limits are real. The Census returns nothing at all for a ZIP and trade combination that's too small to publish, with no flag and no explicit zero. Population counts residents, not the businesses and offices around them, so a small-population ZIP with commercial space can look like an extreme cluster without meaning much. And the category lumps plumbing and HVAC together.
The better question isn't "which ZIP has the most HVAC companies." It's "which suburbs do the companies I compete with actually show up in when a homeowner searches?" The Census data can tell you where a company is registered. Only a search from inside the suburb tells you who a customer sees.
For how I turn this into a plan, see Tulsa HVAC marketing.