The mortgage lead follow-up schedule: 20 days, then a year

Most bought mortgage leads are not worked to a conclusion. They are worked for two days and then quietly abandoned. The schedule below is the calendar half of the problem: which days, at what hours, from which number, and what happens on day 21 when the intensive stretch is over and the lead is still yours.

How many attempts it takes before you have earned the right to stop is a separate question with an actual dataset behind it, and it is taken apart in how many times to call a mortgage lead. This page assumes that answer and builds the diary around it.

How fast to make the first call

Two to five minutes. Treat it as a hard target, because the thing that decays is not the lead's interest in a mortgage, it is their memory of having asked.

The person who submitted the form three minutes ago is still holding the phone that submitted it. Three hours later they are back in their day, and an unknown number is a stranger calling about something they half remember doing. The request has not changed. The context around it has gone.

In practice the constraint is almost never the dialer. It is the gap between a lead arriving in the system and a named person owning it. If the first call goes out ninety minutes after delivery, the fix is a rota, not software.

The 20 day schedule

The shape of this schedule is our own operating practice, not a measurement, and the spacing on the axis is a diagram rather than a scale. The one part of it with a published dataset underneath, the number of attempts before the return flattens, is sourced on the attempt count page.

Why three different times of day

Because three attempts in one afternoon test one hypothesis about somebody's schedule, and three attempts across a morning, a lunchtime and an evening test three.

The windows worth aiming at are early morning and after working hours, in the borrower's local time rather than yours. Midday is when they are at work, which is exactly when a call about their mortgage is least welcome and least likely to be answered.

There is a legal floor under this and it is worth knowing rather than assuming. The FTC's Telemarketing Sales Rule prohibits an outbound call before 8am or after 9pm at the called person's location.

Source: 16 C.F.R. 310.4(c), FTC Telemarketing Sales Rule, calling time restrictions. ecfr.gov · This page is not legal advice and the rule has its own definitions and exemptions. Read it, or have counsel read it, rather than taking a summary from anybody including us.

So the usable day is bounded at both ends, the most valuable parts of it sit against those bounds, and a caller working a single time zone in their own local hours is systematically calling the rest of the country at the wrong moment.

Why double-dial

One unknown number ringing once is noise. The same number ringing again within a minute is a different signal, and enough people read it as something that might matter to make it worth the extra dial.

It costs one attempt and no money, which makes it the cheapest change on this page. It is also not a licence to keep dialling: two rings in a row inside a scheduled attempt is a pattern, six calls in an afternoon is harassment, and the schedule is what keeps the difference clear.

Why a fresh number from day 3

A number that has been ignored twice is carrying that history in two places. With the person, who now recognises it as the number that keeps calling. And with the carrier analytics engines, which score numbers on their own behaviour and can label one without telling you.

Rotating from day 3 with at least two numbers in play does two things at once: it gives the later attempts a clean start, and it caps how much of a week a single flagged number can cost you. If calls are going to voicemail without ringing at all, that is a different problem and it is the one in why mortgage leads do not answer, which also has the two minute test for it.

Day 21 onward, which is where most of the money is left

The leads you paid for are yours after the intensive stretch ends. Most desks work one hard for twenty days and then drop it, and that is the single most expensive habit in this product.

The reason is not persistence for its own sake. It is that a mortgage lead's timing is not your timing. The person reaches the point where they actually need the purchase, the refinance or the cash out on a schedule set by their own life, sometimes months after they first asked about it. At that moment they contact whoever was still in front of them.

Built once, this runs without anyone thinking about it, and the marginal cost of a deal it surfaces is close to nothing, because the lead was already paid for. That is the whole argument for it and it does not need dressing up.

What breaks this schedule

• Nobody owns the first ten minutes. Every day it slips, the two to five minute target is decided by whoever happens to look at the CRM.
• The producer is making attempts one to six. That is an expensive way to reach voicemail, and it is why those attempts stop happening in a busy week.
• One phone number for everything. One label and the whole desk goes quiet at once.
• Calling in your own hours. Three attempts in your afternoon is one attempt, repeated.
• No stop rule and no drip. Leads leak out of the process instead of graduating from it.

The short version

• First call in two to five minutes, because what decays is the memory of asking.
• Days 1 to 5 carry most of it: three calls a day at three different hours, double-dialled, message after each.
• Fresh number from day 3, at least two in rotation.
• Day 10 and day 20 catch the person who was away.
• Then a drip out to a year, because their timing is not yours.

If the calls are not landing at all, start with why mortgage leads do not answer rather than with the schedule. Buying questions rather than operating ones are on our FAQ.