Where to buy cash-out refinance and home equity leads
Lenders buy cash-out refinance and home equity leads from four kinds of vendors: marketplaces, list and data sellers, pay-per-call or live transfer vendors, and generators that run their own campaigns. Neither category is usually listed as a product, so before you buy leads, ask to see the form question, the lien requested and the consent record.
Updated October 23, 2026
If you want the product itself taken apart, what the borrower asks for and what a form can and cannot tell you, read what a cash-out refinance lead is. The rest of this page covers buying one, buying a home equity lead on purpose, and what to do when a vendor hands you one under the other's name.
Where to buy cash-out refinance and home equity leads
Cash-out refinance and home equity leads come from the same four kinds of vendors that sell every other mortgage lead. Each type suits a different desk, and the label on a lead is only as good as the form behind it. The table sets out what you buy from each vendor type, where it helps a lender and where it costs one.
| Vendor type | What you buy | Good for | Bad for | Ask before you buy |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Marketplace | A homeowner who asked a comparison site for refinance offers, often sent to more than one lender | Rate-competitive desks that want volume and can call within the minute | Cash-out, because a borrower holding several offers compares rate, and one refinance box on the form can mix both products | How many lenders receive each lead, and did the form ask for a cash amount and a lien position? |
| List and data seller | Names and addresses picked by equity, loan age or loan-to-value, or old inquiries resold months later | Direct mail and firm offers of credit sent at scale | Calling. Nobody on a list asked to hear from you, and a credit bureau prescreen list carries a name and address, not a phone number | Where did the data come from, and what consent, if any, covers a phone call to this person? |
| Pay-per-call or live transfer | A homeowner already on the phone, connected to your line | Desks that keep a licensed officer free during the hours the calls arrive | Teams that cannot staff the line. A transfer nobody picks up is gone, and the call starts before you know what the caller asked for | What was the caller told before the transfer, and which calls count as billable? |
| Generator running its own campaigns | An inquiry from the vendor's own ads and forms, often sold to one buyer | Cash-out and home equity, because the form can ask for the amount, the reason and the lien before anyone calls | Volume on demand. Campaigns need time to find these borrowers, and neither category is usually listed, so you order it by asking | Can I see the form, and will you put in writing who else receives the lead? |
One kind of list changed in 2026. Since 4 March 2026, a credit bureau may sell a list built from a consumer's mortgage credit inquiry only as a firm offer of credit, and only to a buyer holding the consumer's authorization, the lender or servicer of the consumer's current mortgage, or a bank or credit union where the consumer holds a current account. The plain reading is in the trigger lead ban in plain terms, and the firm offer itself is explained under prescreened offer.
Source: 15 U.S.C. 1681b(c)(1)(B)(i), Fair Credit Reporting Act, under which a consumer report for a transaction the consumer did not start may be furnished when the transaction consists of a firm offer of credit, and 1681b(c)(2)(A), which limits what the recipient of such a list may receive to the name and address of the consumer plus a non-unique identifier. Read in the 2023 edition of the United States Code on 24 September 2026. govinfo.gov · Homebuyers Privacy Protection Act, Public Law 119-36 (H.R. 2808), approved 5 September 2025. Section 2 adds the firm offer and the authorization or relationship conditions for reports requested in connection with a residential mortgage loan, and section 3 makes the Act effective 180 days after enactment, which is 4 March 2026. Read on 24 September 2026. govinfo.gov · The four vendor types describe how the market is organized. They are not a survey, and the table gives no price, count or market share per type because we found no primary source for one.The market publishes little about this category
On 15 September 2026 we opened fifteen vendor sites selling mortgage leads to lenders and loan officers, and recorded what each one listed as a product. Not one of them named cash-out refinance as a lead type. Three listed home equity and one listed non-QM, which sit next to this category without being it.
When we read the same sites again on 15 October 2026, four of the fifteen named cash-out refinance: one as a web lead and live transfer type, one as a funnel it builds for lenders, one on a single state page, and one as a filter on aged refinance leads. None of the four put a price on it as its own category. The market we reviewed still publishes little here.
Read that for exactly what it is. It is a statement about fifteen sites on two days, not a claim that nobody sells these leads. Plenty of vendors will sell you cash-out inquiries if you ask; what most of them do not do is publish the category, which means there is rarely a menu to compare, no listed price and seldom a vendor page setting out what their cash-out lead contains. You are negotiating in the dark unless you bring your own questions.
Source: our own review of fifteen mortgage lead vendor sites, opened 15 September 2026 and read again on 15 October 2026, recording the lead types each site listed on its own public pages. It covers the sites we opened on those dates and nothing else. The named, vendor-by-vendor version of that review is published at our disclosed comparison section.Three products arrive under one refinance heading
Refinance is a bucket word, and three products arrive under it. A rate-and-term refinance changes the rate or the term and hands the borrower no meaningful cash. A cash-out refinance satisfies the existing first mortgage with a larger one and pays the difference to the homeowner. A home equity loan or line leaves that first mortgage alone and sits behind it as a second lien.
| What the vendor may call it | What the borrower is asking for | The existing first mortgage | Lien it creates | Why a buyer should care |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Rate-and-term refinance | A lower payment or a shorter term, no money out | Satisfied by the new loan | First | The borrower is shopping rate, so you are in a price contest from the first sentence |
| Cash-out refinance | A stated sum against equity, for a stated reason | Satisfied by the new, larger loan | First | The borrower will accept a worse rate to get the cash, so rate is not the axis |
| Home equity loan or line | Money against equity without touching the first mortgage | Untouched, and so is its rate | Subordinate | A different product, often a different desk, and not a cash-out lead |
| Non-QM | Anything, documented a different way | Depends entirely on the purpose | Depends | An underwriting route rather than a loan purpose, so it says nothing about cash-out |
Home equity is the substitution that costs a buyer most
A vendor listing home equity is not evidence that it sells cash-out refinance leads, and accepting one for the other is the substitution that costs a buyer most. A home equity borrower keeps the existing first mortgage and the rate on it. A cash-out borrower gives that rate up. Same property, same equity figure, two different conversations and often two different desks.
The damage shows up on the call. A homeowner who came in asking to keep their first mortgage and add a line behind it hears a cash-out pitch as a downgrade, because for them it usually is. A homeowner who wanted one payment and a lump sum hears a second-lien pitch as a dodge. Both conversations end politely and neither closes, and the lead looks like a quality problem when it was a labeling problem.
The federal record keeps these apart, which is a useful sanity check on any vendor who does not. Lien status is its own reported item and so is whether the credit is an open-end line, so a second lien home equity line and a cash-out first mortgage are different rows in the data before anyone argues about what to call them.
If home equity is what your desk wants, buy it under its own name. Ask for a form that asked for a second lien and offered a line or a fixed loan, the same way you would ask a cash-out vendor for the amount and the reason. How we sell home equity leads under their own name, with the two products side by side: HELOC leads. The routes for buying HELOC leads and what to check on each: where to buy HELOC leads.
Four questions that expose a mislabeled cash-out lead
Ask these four before money moves. Each one separates a genuine cash-out inquiry from a rate shopper or a second-lien inquiry that got filed under the wrong heading, and each answer is a fact the vendor either holds or does not. A vendor who cannot answer them has not measured what they are selling.
- Show me the question the consumer answered. Not the field name in your export, the wording on the form. If nothing on the form asked what the money was for, nothing in the lead can tell you this person wants cash rather than a cheaper payment.
- Did the consumer state an amount? A cash-out inquiry has a number attached because the borrower has a use for it. A refinance inquiry with no amount is a rate shopper until proven otherwise, whatever the lead is labeled.
- Is this a first lien request or a second lien request? Ask it in those words. If the vendor cannot tell you, they are selling you a home equity and cash-out feed mixed together and letting you sort it on the phone at your own cost.
- Is the property the consumer's own home? Occupancy changes the product, the pricing and the borrower's rights at closing. A cash-out on a property the borrower does not live in is a different loan, covered in the lead types compared.
Questions to ask a vendor before you buy leads
The four questions above test the label. The five below test the vendor's terms, and each answer belongs in writing before money moves. A vendor who answers only on a call has given you nothing you can enforce. The same five apply to cash-out refinance leads and home equity leads alike.
- Is the lead exclusive, and where does the contract say so? Ask for a written line that each lead goes to one buyer, the way we define the word: one lead goes to exactly one client. Then ask what the contract says if the same inquiry reaches a second buyer. If the lead is shared, ask how many buyers receive it, as a number rather than an adjective. Cash-out borrowers are usually not shopping rate, so a shared inquiry wastes the one advantage the category gives you.
- Whose name is on the consent? Prior express written consent authorizes a named seller to call a named phone number. Ask to see the language the consumer agreed to, whether it covers your company, and whether the vendor can pull the TCPA consent records for a single lead when you ask.
- What happens with a bad lead? Get three things into the contract: what counts as a bad lead, how long you have to flag one, and what you receive, a credit, a substitute lead or nothing at all. A policy that lives only in a sales email is not a term. The wider question is set out in what a lead vendor owes you when a lead is bad.
- Where did this lead come from? The vendor's own ad and form, a partner's site, or another company upstream. Each hop adds one more business that held the lead before you, which is the question behind a lead aggregator.
- Can I measure this source by the loan? Ask for a lead ID and a timestamp on every lead that you can match to your own loan system. Without them you cannot judge the source on cost per funded loan, not cost per lead, and cost per lead is the number that flatters a cheap source.
What the federal record settles, and what it leaves open
Cash-out refinancing is a separate loan purpose in federal mortgage reporting, so the category exists in the record even where the lead market does not name it. In 2025, lenders reported 951,304 originations coded as cash-out refinancing and 1,040,789 coded as refinancing across the fifty states and the District of Columbia. In 2024 the order was the other way round.
The 2024 counts were 768,158 cash-out refinancings against 698,162 refinancings. Two adjacent years, and the larger of the two categories swapped. That is the number worth carrying away from this section, because it says a vendor's single "refinance leads" bucket is two products whose relative size moves with rates, and a filter that was roughly half cash-out in one year is not a filter, it is a coincidence.
What the record does not settle is where the line sits. The official commentary to the reporting rule says a lender reports a cash-out refinancing when it treats the loan as one under its own guidelines or an investor's guidelines, and gives the mirror case: where the cash does not pass the institution's threshold, the same loan is reported as an ordinary refinancing. There is no federal dollar figure. So no vendor can point at a rule to justify their label, and the only check available to a buyer is the question the consumer was asked.
Source: 12 CFR 1003.4(a)(3), Regulation C, which requires reporting of whether the loan is a home purchase loan, a home improvement loan, a refinancing, a cash-out refinancing, or another purpose · Official commentary to 1003.4(a)(3), comment 2, for a cash-out refinancing being what the institution or its investor treats as one under their guidelines, and comment 2.ii for the case where it is reported as an ordinary refinancing instead. Read via the eCFR renderer API, title 12 as issued 14 September 2026, on 20 September 2026. ecfr.gov · Counts from the CFPB HMDA Data Browser aggregations API, retrieved 20 September 2026 and queried again with the same filters on 24 September 2026 with the same result, filtered to action taken "loan originated" and summed across the fifty states and the District of Columbia. US territories are not included. ffiec.cfpb.govPrice and conversion in this category have no published source
We went looking for a price index and a conversion benchmark specific to cash-out leads, and neither exists in any form we could open. No vendor in the reviewed set published a price for the category: none listed it on 15 September 2026, and the four that named it on 15 October 2026 did not price it on its own. No independent study we found measures conversion on it separately from refinance as a whole.
- There is no cash-out lead price index, and nothing to substitute for one. The general refinance prices that do get published are prices for a mixed bucket, and the previous section is the reason that bucket cannot stand in for this one. What moves the price of any mortgage lead is set out in what drives the price of a mortgage lead.
- There is no conversion study for the category. Not disputed, absent. Every figure we chased came from a company selling leads, with no denominator attached. The figures that do carry a source, for mortgage leads in general, are collected in lead to funded loan benchmarks.
- Our own list prices are on our pricing page, not here. They are one seller's prices, they describe our own feed rather than the market, and a house number presented as a market rate is the thing this section exists to avoid.
So judge an offer the way you would judge any lead source with no public price: on cost per funded loan, using your own closing rate, over a run long enough to mean something. The method is the same one used for the category that does have public prices, laid out in where to buy purchase mortgage leads.
Where this page comes from
We sell mortgage leads, so read it knowing that. It carries no figure about our own price, volume or results, because its subject is how to judge an offer rather than how to make one. What we can say about our own leads is how they are screened: each one is checked against our qualification criteria, and a lead that misses them is never delivered and never billed. How we sell our own: cash-out refinance leads.
The fifteen-vendor review behind the market section is published with the vendors named, and with each fact tagged by where it came from, at our disclosed comparison section. Names belong there and not here.
Questions this page answers
From four kinds of vendors: marketplaces that sell a comparison-site inquiry, often to more than one lender; list and data sellers; pay-per-call and live transfer vendors; and generators that run their own ads and forms. Of the fifteen vendor sites on our comparison page, none listed cash-out refinance as a lead type on 15 September 2026, when three listed home equity, and four named cash-out refinance when we read them again on 15 October 2026. In practice you ask a vendor for the category by name, then check the form the lead came from before you buy leads in volume.
No, and treating them as one is the most common mistake in this category. A home equity loan or line of credit leaves the existing first mortgage in place and adds a second lien behind it, so the borrower keeps the rate they already have. A cash-out refinance satisfies the first mortgage with a larger loan at today’s rate. Federal mortgage reporting keeps them apart too, recording lien status and whether the credit is an open-end line, at 12 CFR 1003.4(a)(14) and 1003.4(a)(37).
Ask whether the consumer asked for a second lien or a new first mortgage, and whether the form offered a line of credit or a fixed loan. Then ask how many lenders receive the same lead, which company the consent language names, and what the contract says happens to a bad lead. A home equity lead that turns out to be a cash-out inquiry, or the reverse, costs you a call and leaves a borrower who feels misread.
Look for a stated use of proceeds and an amount. A rate-and-term borrower wants a lower payment or a shorter term and is not asking for money. A cash-out borrower wants a sum for a stated reason, usually debt consolidation, a renovation or business capital, and will accept a worse rate to get it. If the form the consumer filled in never asked how much cash they wanted or what for, the vendor is sorting a refinance feed by guesswork, not selling you a cash-out lead.
Not by any fixed amount. Under the official commentary to 12 CFR 1003.4(a)(3), a lender reports a loan as a cash-out refinancing when it treats the loan as one under its own guidelines or an investor’s guidelines, for example because of the amount of cash the borrower receives. The commentary gives the mirror case too: where the cash does not pass the institution’s threshold, the same loan is reported as an ordinary refinancing. So the label follows the buyer of the loan, which is why a vendor’s label needs checking against the form rather than against a rule.
Outside our own list prices, there is no published price for the category, and we looked. No vendor in the set we reviewed listed cash-out refinance at all on 15 September 2026. Four named it when we read the same sites again on 15 October 2026, and none of the four priced it as its own category; the nearest thing is an aged-lead seller’s refinance rate card, on which cash-out is one filter. No independent index for this lead type exists that we could open. What gets quoted is a general refinance price. Judge an offer on cost per funded loan using your own closing rate rather than on any list price, and treat any cash-out specific figure you are shown as a number that needs its source named. Our own cash-out list prices, by credit tier, are on visionxlab.com/pricing.
Buying questions rather than research ones are answered on the FAQ, and anything that is not there gets asked on a call.
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