- 168
Sorry for the delay on this. I've been largely out this last week for the Holiday. I'm back, so it's time to "chime in."
You are correct, we are not a member of the " lead cartel." We generate 80+ percent of our leads ourselves in-house and don't buy leads from any lead generator that won't sell them to us exclusively. Further, when we do buy a lead from another lead generator they must generate the lead the same way we do - search only with no affiliate program. We also don't sell any of our leads to other lead generators. Therefore, we don't have to deal with all the "lead swapping" problems.
Don't get me wrong though. I've got nothing against making money. I just have to make sure it does not cost me money in the end. I would sell to another vendor if they would (could) meet my price on an exclusive lead AND could prove to me that they didn't oversell the lead. Don't worry, I doubt that's going to happen any time soon! This is because there is another big problem with the way a lot of lead swapping is being done.
Quite frankly, I don't understand why they use just the agent's license number to try to stop duplicate selling. It's a losing game. It just won't work reliably because they still have the problem of leads getting mislabeled. You see, if they wanted to do it right they need to "flag" at the lead level as well as the agent level. I know this has been done before using a compound key of phone number and last name to label the lead. Ironically, this is the way many lead generators make sure that they aren't selling each other the same lead. However, to make that work, they need to know every lead that agent has bought from every source. That only works if they don't sell leads into an affiliate program that in turn might sell the lead to another lead member that is not a member of the "lead cartel." Otherwise, the same lead might get sold to an agent from a vendor that is not sharing the necessary information to complete the safety checks. Also, they have to make certain they never recycle any leads. Otherwise, they have to flag at the lead level throughout all time. That's a lot of heavy duty database sharing! It's just not practical on a large scale. Recycled leads is another problem in this business.
How many times have you gotten a lead that told you: "I filled that out a month ago." If you ever hear that, call your lead company and ask them to put it in writing that none of your leads are recycled. In fact, just ask them to put it in writing anyway!
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
First of all, I doubt that if they sell the lead up to 8 times it's averaging 2 or 3. I'd say more like 5 or 6.
Bad news: It might not be just 7 other guys, it might be more like 15. It's not uncommon for one of those other 7 to be another lead generator that in turn sells the lead into an affiliate program and it winds up at yet another lead generator that in turn sells it to another 8. But wait, it get's worse. Some lead generators will recycle their leads every 90 days or so, selling it yet again and the cycle repeats. We have heard of leads from some of the members of the "lead cartel" being sold more than 20 times!
Last edited:
