And the Lead Goes Round and Round

I had a rather interesting conversation about lead management and lead sales today. The story went something like this:

A broker enhances listings and purchases zip code leads from a portal. The broker believes that there is some form of exclusivity on the leads generated through the system insofar as the lead is only distributed once. In his case, he distributes the leads as they come in to one of his agents.

To test the system, the broker had a staff member go to the publisher site and generate a lead. The lead came through to the broker as promised. However, the broker (pretending to be a consumer) also got a call from a mortgage company to pre-qualify for a loan. During the call with the loan officer, they suggested that he work with one of the mortgage company's network of agents and asked if he needed help finding an agent.

To the broker, that caused the lead to be "sold" twice. He was rather upset.

The portal takes the lead that they provided to the real estate agent and also sells that lead to the mortgage company. In this case, the mortgage company also has a lead network where they take leads that they generate for mortgage and provide that lead to a real estate agent partner.

So the same consumer lead went to the publisher's broker partner and the mortgage company's broker partner. One lead just became three – one to the publishers premium broker, one to the mortgage company (unbeknownst to the premium broker), and again to the mortgage company's real estate agent network. The poor consumer gets hit three times just for asking if the fireplace is wood burning or gas.