Ping post

Ping post is a real-time auction for a lead. The seller sends a partial record, stripped of name and contact details, to several buyers at once. That is the ping. Each buyer applies its own filters and either bids or declines. The full contact record is then delivered to the buyer that wins. That is the post.

How the ping and the post divide one sale

The seller holds the record and offers a summary of it: state, loan purpose, rough loan size, a self-reported credit band, sometimes little more. A ping carries only what a buyer needs in order to decide, and it reaches every buyer within a second of the form being submitted. Each system compares it against standing filters and returns a price or a refusal. The seller ranks those responses, picks one, and only then sends the post, with the name, the phone number and the email attached.

A lead nobody accepts has a name in the FTC's account of the process: a remnant lead. Where a remnant lead goes next is a separate question from the auction, and the same report treats its onward sale as a risk in its own right rather than as part of the match.

Which regulator has described the auction, and how narrowly

The Federal Trade Commission's Bureau of Consumer Protection described an automated, instantaneous, auction-style process in its September 2016 staff perspective on the October 2015 workshop called Follow the Lead. It named the arrangement a ping tree and placed it in payday and short-term lending. Buyers give the aggregator filters and the prices they will pay. Leads move through the network in real time until one buyer accepts, often the highest bidder.

Two limits on that citation matter. The report covers payday and short-term lending rather than mortgage, and it never uses the words ping post or describes the split between an anonymised offer and a later release of contact details. It is a primary source for the auction, not for the two-step shape the mortgage market gives it.

Why a ping post lead ends up shared

A single submitted form can be sold and resold, which is the reason a lead arrives shared rather than sold once. The FTC report says consumers often do not know this, and may be contacted by marketers unfamiliar to them. It also notes that leads sometimes go to whoever pays the most rather than to whoever fits best. Both follow from the auction itself. Whether that trade is worth making is covered in are shared mortgage leads worth buying.

What the mechanism means for the first call

The consumer at the other end filled in one form and may be fielding several unfamiliar callers within minutes, because the auction resolved in roughly the time the page took to reload. A borrower who sounds impatient at hello is usually reacting to the mechanism rather than to you. Ask who else has called, and read the answer as information about the source rather than about the borrower.

Ping post is industry practice, not a regulated term. No statute or rule defines it, no regulator publishes what a ping must contain or how long a buyer has to answer, and the boundary between the anonymised ping and the identified post is a convention that varies by vendor and by contract. What is described above is the mechanism as it operates, not a defined standard. The single primary source below covers the auction, and it does not cover the term.

Source: FTC Bureau of Consumer Protection, "Follow the Lead" Workshop, Staff Perspective, September 2016, reporting on the Commission's public workshop of 30 October 2015, read in full on 20 September 2026 at ftc.gov. It supports the automated, instantaneous, auction-style process it calls a ping tree, the buyer-supplied filters and prices, the real-time match until a buyer accepts and the observation that this is often the highest bidder, the remnant lead when no buyer accepts, and the statements that a consumer's information can be sold and re-sold multiple times and sometimes goes to whoever pays the most rather than to the best fit. It does not use the term ping post, does not describe the anonymised ping and identified post as separate messages, and addresses payday and short-term lending rather than mortgage. No count of buyers per lead is printed here because that report gives none and no other primary source does.