Where to buy cash-out refinance leads
What the mortgage lead market publishes about cash-out refinance leads, why home equity and rate-and-term are not substitutes for it, and the questions that expose a mislabelled cash-out lead before you pay.
Cash-out refinance is one of the larger things a lender originates and one of the smallest things the lead market talks about.
That gap is the whole subject of this page. If you want the product itself taken apart, what the borrower is asking for and what the form can and cannot tell you, that is what a cash-out refinance lead is. This page is about buying one, and about what to do when a vendor hands you something else under the same name.
The market publishes almost nothing 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. Two listed home equity and one listed non-QM, which sit next to this category without being it. The market we reviewed publishes almost nothing here.
Read that for exactly what it is. It is a statement about fifteen sites on one day, not a claim that nobody sells these leads. Plenty of vendors will sell you cash-out inquiries if you ask; what almost none of them do is publish the category, which means there is no menu to compare, no listed price and no vendor page setting out what their cash-out record 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, recording the lead types each site listed on its own public pages. It covers the sites we opened on that date 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 practical damage shows up in the call, not in the spreadsheet. 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 labelling 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.
Five questions that expose a mislabelled cash-out lead
Ask these five before money moves, and ask them in writing. 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 record 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 labelled.
- 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.
- Who else gets this same inquiry, and how many of them? Ask for a number in a sentence rather than an adjective. Cash-out borrowers are usually not shopping rate, so a shared inquiry wastes the one advantage the category gives you.
The general version of this list, the one that applies to any mortgage lead rather than this category, is in what to look for when buying mortgage leads.
Source: 12 CFR 1003.4(a)(6), Regulation C, which records whether the property is occupied by the borrower as a principal residence, a second residence or an investment property, as a reported item separate from loan purpose and lien status. Read via the eCFR renderer API, title 12 as issued 14 September 2026, on 20 September 2026. ecfr.govWhat 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, 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, because none of them listed the category. 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.
- We are not publishing a number of our own here. Our own cash-out figures are operational, 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.
The fifteen-vendor review behind the first 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 the same four routes every other mortgage lead comes through: your own advertising, a vendor that sells each inquiry to one buyer, a vendor that sells the same inquiry to several lenders at once, or aged data resold months later. What is different about cash-out is that almost nobody advertises the category. Across fifteen vendor sites we opened on 15 September 2026, none listed cash-out refinance as a lead type, so in practice you are asking a vendor to filter a general refinance feed rather than buying a product off a menu.
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).
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.
There is no published price for the category, and we looked. No vendor in the set we reviewed on 15 September 2026 listed cash-out refinance at all, so none of them priced it, and 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.
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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