Buying Mortgage Leads
If you have good mortgage leads, why would you sell them?
There is this illusion that Lead companies sell the leads because they “Can’t Do Mortgages.” Personally I think this is a joke. It most states it only takes a weekend class to be a mortgage broker and the Lead companies could work their own deals, or better yet there are plenty of out-of-work mortgage experts who could be hired to work the leads for these companies at very low salaries. Some probably do both, who would you ever know? Keep the “good leads” and sell the “bad leads” for $40 a pop to pay for marketing costs.
Think about a live transfer lead. We all know in the first few seconds of a conversation if a lead is crap, so the telemarketer gets instructions - If the person wants a mortgage and they meet these criteria - transfer them to ”our” mortgage company, if they sound like a trainwreck send em to the four other companies who commited to paying us $40 per lead. If you don’t think this happens - it does.
Internet leads are even worse. You have affiliates pumping leads to the lead sites who then sell the leads to you. The “borrower” thought he was entering to win a free cruise and next thing he knows 27 mortgage brokers, 11 credit card companies, and 14 life insurance salesmen are blowing up their phone. You don’t know why the person entered their information, what the motivation was, or if they even knew who they were giving their information to!
We get our leads from our own marketing efforts. On average I spend around $60 per “lead”, I consider a Lead each person that calls in about our services. Our marketing targets the types of borrowers we want, the type of leads we can actually close. If I ran an advertisement that said “No matter how bad your credit is, No matter how far upside down you are, No Matter how many payments your behind on your mortgage, CALL TODAY!” that lead cost would drop to $10 or less - but what good would it do me? All it would do is waste a lot of my Loan Officer’s time talking to people we can’t help. If my plan was to sell those leads for $40 a piece, It would be a great plan - and there lies the problem.
What I have found is the “why” behind the lead is the most important part, and when you buy leads from someone else you give this up. I have spent a lot of time perfecting our marketing efforts to filter the calls we get, to get just the right message that motivates a person in the right situation to call us.
You can read more about my thoughts on mortgage marketing here.