Mortgage broker leads in Australia

What a lead actually contains

A lead is not a phone number. It is a person who asked for help with a loan, wrapped in enough context to make the first call worth making. Before paying anyone a dollar, ask what sits in each record. Ours carry five things.

• Name, suburb and state, so you know who you are calling and which market they sit in.
• A mobile that passed an SMS check minutes earlier.
• Rough loan size, and whether they own the property now.
• The reason they enquired, in their own words where the form captured them.
• A timestamp and a consent trail, so you can see when they asked and prove they agreed to a call.

Strip that context away and the price should collapse, because what remains is a cold call with a receipt. Most horror stories about bought leads turn out to be thin records sold at fat prices.

The competition is other brokers

Broker share was 55.3 per cent in March 2018. Eight years later it is 81.0 per cent, and the same MFAA report counts $124.88 billion in new loans settled through leading aggregators in that one quarter. So the person who fills in a refinance form is rarely weighing a broker against a bank. They are weighing you against whichever broker reaches them first, and a lead is a paid place in that race. The rest of this page is about not wasting it.

Exclusive and shared are different products

A shared lead is one enquiry sold to several brokers at once, commonly three to five. That is a legitimate product, not a swindle. It costs less because the cost of finding the borrower is split across every buyer, and so is the chance of writing the loan. A phone team that dials inside two minutes can make shared leads pay. A sole broker who calls back after a client meeting is mostly funding that phone team's pipeline.

Everything we sell is exclusive, so treat our view as a vendor's view. The full working on both models is in exclusive versus shared leads.

What the SMS check changes

Before a lead goes out, a code goes to the mobile on the form and the enquirer types it back. That small step decides what you pay for. A mistyped number, an invented one or a mate's mobile all fail the check, so they never reach your CRM and are never billed.

Over a week of calling, that moves the numbers you actually feel. Raw form fills carry a share of numbers nobody can ring, and you pay for those dead dials in time even when you do not pay in dollars. SMS verified mortgage broker leads start from a different floor: every number rings a handset that was in the enquirer's hand at the moment they asked. The check does not read intent, though. A working number says nothing about deposit or timing, so the form answers travel with the lead and the first call still does the qualifying.

The pipeline is built and run in Brisbane, and lead data stays in Australia.

Speed to first call beats everything

Whether mortgage broker leads pay for themselves is mostly settled before you buy any, by one habit: how fast the first call happens. A borrower fills in a form in a stolen moment, on a lunch break or waiting for the kettle. A few minutes later that moment is gone. Call inside it and you are the obvious next step. Call tomorrow and you are an interruption from a name they half remember.

An exclusive lead buys you minutes, not days. Nobody else has the number, but attention cools at the same rate either way. A few habits protect the spend.

• Send every new lead to a phone somebody is holding, not to an inbox checked at the end of the day.
• If the call goes unanswered, text straight away. A short message from a real name gets a reply where a missed call gets ignored.
• Try again the same day. Plenty of people answer a second attempt and never return a voicemail.

None of that is our product, but all of it decides whether our product works, so we would rather say it before you buy.

When not to buy leads

Some of the worst results in this market come from selling leads to brokers who should never have bought them. We would rather lose those sales than argue about credits later. Four situations where the answer is no:

• You cannot call within minutes. Speed swamps everything a provider does. Called a day late, an exclusive lead performs like the shared one you refused to pay for.
• Referrals already fill your diary. A referred client lands warmer than any bought enquiry ever will. Use leads to smooth the gaps between referrals, not to crowd them out.
• You plan to judge the channel on five leads. A handful of leads is an anecdote whichever way it goes. If the budget only covers a handful, spend it elsewhere.
• Follow up means one voicemail. Some borrowers answer the third or fourth attempt. If nobody in the office will make that attempt, the leads are not the weak point.

If none of that sounds like you, what is left is a fit conversation: your areas, your filters and a fixed price per lead agreed before the first one arrives. Our guide to qualifying leads before calling covers the first fifteen minutes after a lead lands.