The market's largest vendor says it in its own terms
PrivateMortgageLeads.ai is the largest pay-per-lead player in this space. Its own published terms, pulled July 14, 2026, spell out where it draws the line when a borrower goes quiet: a prospect who "did not return or answer my phone calls" does not warrant a refund. Not vague marketing copy. A written policy, published in plain language.
We draw our replacement fence in the same place, and we think every honest vendor has to. The rest of this piece is why the fence sits there, what belongs on each side of it, and what a vendor's answer to this question tells you before you sign.
What a real replacement trigger looks like, and what does not
We tie replacement to a defect in the record, not to what happens after delivery. A wrong or disconnected phone number, fake or duplicate information, and a property outside the lender's stated lending states are all defects. Each one is something we got wrong before the lender ever picked up the phone.
What is not a defect: a borrower who did not qualify for the credit box, a deal that was not the one the lender wanted, a closing that never happened, a call that went unanswered, or a borrower who changed their mind. None of those are wrong with the lead. They are ordinary outcomes of underwriting and follow-up, and we do not warrant outcomes. Our own qualification bar is a property under contract, not a credit score or a promise that the deal closes.
Why the fence sits here
Move "didn't answer" onto the refundable side and the vendor's incentive changes shape. Instead of being paid to deliver a reachable person attached to a live deal, the vendor is now paid to avoid a chargeback. Every unanswered call becomes a negotiation about whose fault the silence was, not a straightforward exchange of a fee for a lead.
A narrow, written fence around defects in the record, and nothing past that, is what lets a vendor charge a flat price per lead and mean it. The lender knows exactly what they are buying: a real person attached to a real property, with a working phone number. What happens after delivery is underwriting and outreach, which is the lender's job, not the vendor's, whether the call gets answered or not.
What this means before you sign with any vendor
The market's largest vendor does not treat a no-answer as a refund trigger. Neither do we, and we tell you so before you buy rather than in a dispute afterward. If a vendor you are evaluating promises otherwise, read the promise carefully: either the price already contains the cost of those refunds, or the definition of "didn't answer" will get argued lead by lead.
And since the no-answer risk sits on the buyer's side of the line wherever you buy, the one lever you fully control is how fast the first call goes out. Whatever vendor you choose, the speed of your own follow-up is the variable that moves the outcome most, precisely because nobody refunds the silence.
Before signing with any vendor, run their terms through the five questions we published for exactly this purpose. Find out what counts as a replacement, who owns the ad account, and what happens to a lead that never picks up. The answers tell you more about a vendor than the pitch ever will, because the fine print is where the real terms sit.