Mortgage lead types compared: aged, shared, live transfer

Four things get sold as mortgage leads. They are not four grades of one product.

They are four different splits of the same work between the seller and the desk that buys, priced accordingly.

None of them is a trick. The cheap ones are cheap for reasons that are easy to state, and on some desks those reasons genuinely do not matter.

The same enquiry, four routes

One person fills in one form asking about a refinance. What happens to that enquiry next depends entirely on which product a lender bought.

The routes are not quality grades. Read down the price column and you are reading how much of the work was already done before the lead reached you.

The four, side by side

Aged leads

Start with what is genuinely good about them, because it is usually skipped by people who do not sell them.

• Cheapest per lead by a wide margin. Nothing else on this list is close.
• Nobody is racing you to the phone. The other buyers, if any, called months ago.
• Volume is available on demand. You can turn the tap on this afternoon.
• Idle calling hours are free. If your desk has people with gaps in the day, aged volume converts a sunk cost into pipeline at a cost per conversation nothing else matches.

That last one is the whole case, and it is a good one. A desk that measures cost per conversation rather than cost per lead can make aged data work when nothing else pencils.

Now the trade, stated as plainly.

• The consumer has moved on. Rates changed, their home value changed, and many of them already closed with somebody else.
• They do not remember asking. An enquiry from four months ago does not feel like an enquiry to the person who made it, and the call opens colder than the price suggests.
• The compliance clock keeps running. Consent does not expire on a schedule, but the federal Do Not Call registry changes underneath it, and the Telemarketing Sales Rule requires the version you scrub against to be no more than 31 days old at the time of the call.

Source: 16 CFR 310.4(b)(3)(iv), Telemarketing Sales Rule. ecfr.gov

Shared leads

Shared leads cost less per lead for exactly the reason they convert worse, and the seller is usually open about it. That honesty is worth something.

• Materially cheaper than exclusive. One enquiry funds several sales, so the price per buyer falls.
• Fresh. The consumer typed their details minutes ago, not months ago.
• Available nationwide at short notice, in quantity.
• Many of these consumers wanted several quotes. Somebody comparing four lenders is not annoyed to hear from four lenders.

The trade is a single sentence, and everything else follows from it.

• Three other people are dialing the same number. The conversation you get is shorter and more comparative than the one you would have had alone.
• Rate becomes the axis. When four callers open the same way inside an hour, the consumer sorts on the one variable they can compare, which is price.
• Ask which parties were named. Under the Telemarketing Sales Rule, a written agreement that permits calls to a registry-listed number has to evidence authorization for calls by or on behalf of a specific party. Get the list you were on.

Source: 16 CFR 310.4(b)(1)(iii)(B)(1). ecfr.gov · Definition of prior express written consent and its required disclosures at 47 CFR 64.1200(f)(9). ecfr.gov Source: Insurance Marketing Coalition Ltd. v. FCC, No. 24-10277 (11th Cir., 24 January 2025). media.ca11.uscourts.gov

Live transfers

The most work already done, and priced like it. Sometimes called the top of the market, and on work-done-per-lead that is fair.

• Somebody already dialed, reached and screened. You skip the part of the job that consumes the most hours.
• The consumer agreed to speak now. No callback window, no voicemail cadence, no six attempts.
• It suits a desk with no spare dialing capacity but people free to talk. That is a real and common shape, and none of the other three serve it well.

The trades are structural rather than reputational.

• Highest price of the four, which is the honest consequence of the work included.
• The screening standard is the seller’s. Ask what was asked, in writing, before comparing a transfer price with anything else.
• Transfers arrive on the calling floor’s clock. If your people are not seated when that floor is dialing, you are paying a premium for calls you drop.
• The call before yours is your reputation. Under the Telemarketing Sales Rule a call counts as abandoned if the consumer is not connected to a sales representative within two seconds of finishing their greeting. What that floor does in those two seconds arrives attached to your name.

Source: 16 CFR 310.4(b)(1)(iv), abandoned calls. ecfr.gov · Rule text and enforcement summary at ftc.gov

Exclusive and pre-qualified

This is what we sell, so read this section knowing that. We have tried to write it the way we would want a competitor to write theirs.

• One lead goes to exactly one client. That sentence is the entire meaning of the word exclusive. Anything else a vendor attaches to it is decoration.
• Screened before it is sent. The criteria are ours and they are fixed, which is the part that costs money and the part that removes volume.
• Delivered while the consumer is still on the page. Median delivery under one second, nine of ten within five minutes, and 94.8% of landing-page leads delivered.
• Middle of the market on price and on work-done. Some sellers pre-qualify and then share. Some sell exclusive without screening. Doing both is where this sits.

Where we are the wrong answer, which is a real list.

• You want maximum conversations for minimum spend. Buy aged data and work it properly. We will lose that comparison and we should.
• You have nobody to dial and want the phone to ring already connected. That is a live transfer product, not this one.
• Screening removes volume. A criteria set that holds is a criteria set that says no, and a desk sized for volume will find the flow smaller than it wanted.
• Exclusivity buys the first conversation, not the only one. Consumers shop. Nobody selling leads can stop that, and anyone implying otherwise is selling you a feeling.

A fifth route that used to exist

Trigger leads belong in any honest comparison from a year ago, and belong in this one only as history.

The Homebuyers Privacy Protection Act closed the sale of prescreened lists built from a mortgage credit inquiry to parties with no existing relationship to that consumer, with effect from March 2026. If a budget line was funded by trigger data, something else is being delivered against it now.

Source: Public Law 119-36, 119th Congress, enrolled text. govinfo.gov · Full read: the trigger lead ban in plain terms.

The number that decides it is not price per lead

Price per lead ranks these four in one fixed order. Cost per funded loan can rank them in a different one, and it is the only ranking that pays anybody.

• Divide the price by your own close rate. Not the seller’s, and not a number off a benchmark page. If you have no measured figure yet, a 5% average is a reasonable place to start and then correct from your own file.
• Add the hours. Aged data at a quarter of the price that needs four times the dials is the same cost, unless those hours were idle, in which case it is a bargain.
• Cost per funded loan can differ by several multiples across the four routes, in both directions, on the same desk in the same month.
• The order flips on capacity, not on quality. Hours you already pay for are free. Hours you do not have cost more than any price per lead on the list.

The lever that outranks the choice

Which of the four you buy matters less than what happens in the ten minutes after it lands. Two figures make that case better than an argument would.

Velocify studied 3.5 million leads and found that 93 percent of the ones that eventually converted were reached by the sixth attempt. Most desks stop at two, whatever they paid per lead.

Source: Velocify study of 3.5 million leads, published around 2013. The original paper is no longer hosted and every version in circulation is a secondary citation, so treat it as directional and dated. Taken apart in how many calls it takes to reach a mortgage lead.

ICE Mortgage Technology reported a 79.8 percent closing rate on purchase applications and 77.5 percent on refinance for December 2021. Once a file is in an origination pipeline, the route the lead arrived by has stopped mattering almost entirely.

Source: ICE Mortgage Technology (formerly Ellie Mae) Origination Insight Report, December 2021. The series has no traceable data point after 2021 and the report is no longer publicly hosted, so the year travels with the figure. Denominators and caveats in what the data supports between a lead and a funded loan.

So the difference between the four routes lives entirely at the top of the funnel, and most of that difference is answering speed and attempt count. A well-worked aged lead beats a neglected exclusive one, every time, on any desk.

What we could not source

Three gaps, stated rather than papered over.

• There is no independent price index for mortgage leads by type. The ordering on this page is our own read of what gets quoted in this market. It is not a measurement, and we are not printing our own figure on a page comparing everybody’s.
• There is no audited study comparing conversion by lead type. Every such table we chased was published by a company selling one of the four.
• Contact rate, booking rate and preapproval rate have no primary source at all. Not disputed, absent. We take that apart in what the data supports.

Choosing, in one pass

• Spare calling hours and a tight budget → aged, worked properly.
• Genuinely competitive rate and instant answering → shared.
• Nobody free to dial, somebody free to talk → live transfer.
• Fewer conversations, more of them worth having, and the first call → exclusive and pre-qualified.
• No spare hours and no spare budget → fix the follow-up process first. None of the four survives contact with a desk that calls twice and stops.

Two related pages: what the data supports between a lead and a funded loan, and how many calls it takes to reach a mortgage lead. Buying questions are answered on our FAQ.