On July 14, 2026 we pulled the live pricing pages of the major vendors selling borrower leads, or borrower acquisition, to hard money and DSCR lenders. Not their sales decks. Their published pages, as a buyer would find them. Three models dominate the market, and each one hides its real cost in a different place.
Model one: shared pay-per-lead
PrivateMortgageLeads.ai, the largest pay-per-lead player in this space, charges $65 per lead. The number that matters sits in their terms: each lead can be sold to up to 3 lenders.
Price that honestly. If the same borrower goes to three buyers, the economic equivalent of one exclusive lead is roughly $195, and every lead comes with a footrace attached. The lender who calls third is paying $65 for a borrower who has already had two conversations.
Their refund terms are also worth reading, because they set the market standard: a prospect who "did not return or answer my phone calls" does not warrant a refund. That is not a dig. It is the accepted fence in this market, and any vendor who claims otherwise is either mispricing their own risk or planning to argue with you later.
Model two: the agency retainer
The pay-per-click agency model, Hard Money PPC being the visible example, runs $2,500 per month plus a setup fee, with the lender funding all ad spend on top. The lead count is whatever the campaigns produce, and there is no refund mechanism if they produce little.
The retainer is the smallest cost in that model. The lender is also carrying the ad spend, the learning-phase waste, and the platform risk. Lending is a sensitive ad category, and a creative policy flag lands on the ad account that runs the ads. In the agency model, that is the lender's account and the lender's Business Manager.
Model three: pay-on-close
Lendersa charges nothing upfront and takes a fraction of commission only when a loan closes, 30 to 90 days later. It reads like the safest option, and for a lender with spare capacity it can be. But nothing is free: a vendor carrying one hundred percent of the acquisition risk prices that risk into the back end, and the vendor's incentive is volume across their whole panel, not quality into your pipeline specifically.
The comparison that matters is risk placement, not sticker price
A $65 shared lead, a $2,500 retainer plus ad spend, and a free-until-close commission are not really different prices. They are different answers to the question of who carries the risk: the shared model puts it on your speed to the phone, the agency model puts it on your ad account and your patience, and pay-on-close moves it to the vendor and charges accordingly.
Whatever vendor you evaluate, including us, five questions cut through the packaging:
- Is the lead exclusive, in writing? If the terms allow multi-selling, price the race into your math.
- What exactly triggers a replacement? The market standard is narrow: wrong number, fake information, out of footprint. A vendor promising replacements for "bad leads" without a written definition will argue every one.
- What is warranted, and what is not? No honest vendor warrants that a borrower fits your credit box or will fund. That is underwriting, and it is yours.
- Who carries the ad spend and the ad-account risk? If the answer is you, a lending-creative policy flag is your problem, on your account.
- Is consent documented per lead? TCPA consent certificates attached to each lead protect your outbound calling, not just the vendor's.
Ask those five and most pitches in this market answer themselves.