BUY MORTGAGE LEADS?

This was in the days before automation and massive amounts of social media and stuff like that. Very old fashioned, you’d ring them up. You would probably post something in the letterbox forum and send them something else in the post two weeks later.

But I remember, and no word of a lie, conversion rates on those types of deals at that time. So this is, 2007, 2008 and it was something like 7 or 8 out of 10. You’d buy, like I say, 10 at about 350, and you’d turn them into at least a couple of grand’s worth of business.

So that encouraged you to do it again, and you’d do it again. I remember there were three of us in my business at that time, and we all took part and perhaps had differences in conversion rates, but conversions overall were very strong. There was a point in 2008 when the mortgage market obviously exploded for all sorts of reasons. There was an exponential volume of leads coming through the PAA leads system as people were clambering for help with their mortgage rates, which were falling like a stone, people were bailing out of everything; lenders were shutting up shop, and whatever. So we went from buying them at 30 to 40 pounds a go to 2 or 3 pounds. And that actually you just built up a pile; you spent 30 in an afternoon and have 10 or 11 leads to work with.

With low volumes in your business, you could spend the time doing something with them. I’m really pleased to say that what are we now, nearly 20 years on, and there’s still a heck of a number of those customers from that period of time that we still work with on a very regular basis, being good referrers, being great relationships over the years.

The quality of leads has been very good from that kind of time scale and that kind of set of leads. It was a real shame that PAA dissolved away. Moneysupermarket went in the bed with one or two of the larger UK-based mortgage brokers, and that supply of leads finished. But by then we’ve built enough in our portfolios to work with on a regular basis anyway.

So existing businesses ticked along okay, but when you’re looking for new customers have tried them recently the last kind of 2 or 3 years. One in particular that I thought would have some traction was something like giving mortgages, which was a platform where, again, the lead sources were probably half a dozen websites, people signing in online, wanting some advice, and then you’d go and bid for the leads.

And again, a mixture of outputs on those. I think this is probably where we’ve seen a change in those 15, 20 years since the days of PAA. I think there’s, there is plenty of opportunity in that market, but I think because the availability of help and support and advice is so readily available, potentially online that if someone goes in at 9 or 10 o’clock on a form and fills in the details and presses the button and says, I want some help that equally, they’ve probably done the same on half a dozen other platforms in the same 15, 20 minutes. So by the time you get the information, sometimes you may or may not be the first person to have got back to those individuals.

I think in terms of the kind of cost, having started back in the day at 20, 30 pound a lead and then going down to literally almost pennies rather than pounds at certain points to see the cost at roughly about 75 to 100 pounds plus for a mortgage lead when you go on to some of these platforms, it’s a very expensive platform or type of platform to go on.

And I think if you’re only looking at potentially 1 or 2 in 10 converting, I guess there’s a high dependence upon some quality coming through, but at a really big cost.”