What pre-qualified actually rests on when a vendor says it

Pre-qualified is the most abused word in this market, and the abuse is rarely a lie. It is a missing definition.

On a lead, pre-qualified means one thing: the enquiry was checked against criteria before it was sent. Which criteria, and who set them, is the entire product.

What the words mean, in order of strength

The first two happen before you ever speak to the person. The last two are your job and they are where the actual qualifying occurs. Any vendor language that blurs row two into row four is worth stopping on.

The thing most vendors will not say out loud

Every qualifying field on a web lead is self-reported. The consumer picked their credit band from a list. They typed their income. They estimated what their future home is worth. Nothing on that form was checked against a third party at the moment it was submitted, and that is true of our leads too.

Running a real credit check is not a thing a lead vendor can quietly do in the background. Pulling a consumer report requires a permissible purpose under the Fair Credit Reporting Act and a relationship with a bureau. It is a different business, with different obligations, and a company doing it would tell you, because it would be the most expensive thing they do.

Source: permissible purposes for furnishing a consumer report, 15 U.S.C. 1681b. ecfr.gov, Regulation V · Consumer-facing summary at consumerfinance.gov.

So when a lead says the credit band is 700 to 719, the honest reading is that the consumer believes their credit is in that band. That is genuinely useful information and it is not the same as a score. Treating it as a score is how a desk ends up surprised at the first pull.

What screening is actually doing, if it is real

Real screening is a gate. A description of the average is not. The difference shows up in one question: what happens to a lead that misses the criteria.

• A gate holds it back. The lead is not sent, and it is not billed. The criteria cost the seller volume, which is the reason screened leads cost more.
• A description sends it anyway. The criteria describe what most leads look like, and the ones that miss arrive alongside the ones that do not.
• Ask for the criteria as a list. Not as a sentence about quality. A list you could check a lead against yourself after it arrives.
• Ask whether they are fixed or per order. Both models exist and both can be honest. What you cannot have is a vendor who says you set them and also cannot tell you what yours are.

What pre-qualification cannot buy you

Four limits, and none of them is a criticism of the product.

• It does not predict underwriting. Documents decide that, much later, in your system.
• It does not make the consumer exclusive to you. Screening is about the answers, not about distribution. Those are separate questions and both have to be asked. One lead goes to exactly one client is a statement about distribution, and it is the one to get in writing.
• It does not stop somebody shopping. A screened consumer can fill in another form an hour later, and frequently does.
• It removes volume, on purpose. A criteria set that holds is a criteria set that says no. A desk sized for volume will find screened flow smaller than it wanted, and that is the product working rather than failing.

What we could not source

• There is no industry definition of pre-qualified on a lead. No standards body publishes one, so every vendor's usage is their own and comparison across vendors is not possible on the adjective alone.
• There is no study measuring how far self-reported credit bands sit from pulled scores. We looked. The gap is well known anecdotally on every desk and measured nowhere public.
• We are not publishing our own pass rates. Share of enquiries meeting each criterion is operational volume, it tells a competitor our size and tells a buyer nothing about the lead in front of them.

Where we fit, stated narrowly

• The criteria are ours and they are fixed. They do not move per client, which means the answer to what qualifies is the same for everybody.
• A lead that misses them is never delivered and never billed. That is the gate, stated as a gate.
• Credit, income and home value are self-reported. We have no bureau integration and we do not imply one. What we screen is what the consumer told us, checked for internal consistency and completeness.
• Phone verified on our landing page leads. That is a check on the contact detail rather than on the financial picture, and the two are worth keeping separate in your head.
• Consent captured on the form. TrustedForm certificate by ActiveProspect, captured on the landing page form, and pulled on request.

Our own clients report closing 5% to 10% of our leads to funded loans, with our best client up to 14.6%.

Source: client self-reports given on sales calls, not a platform measurement. The loan is originated in the client's own system, so we record no closings of our own and most delivered leads never get a status pushed back to us. Read these as what buyers told us about their own files, not as an audited figure, and check them against your own once you have one.

Related reading: where to buy purchase mortgage leads, fresh against aged purchase leads, and what the data supports between a lead and a funded loan.