This article was written by guest author, “LeadGuru”. If you are interested being a guest author and feel you can contribute to the LeadCritic blog, please send an email to info at leadcritic dot com.

These are tumultuous times in the mortgage industry, very few would disagree. It seems like each and every day something has changed and someone (Company ABC) is out of business. So as a buyer of internet leads how do you manage your daily flow of internet leads during these stressful times and manage all the vendors you buy leads from?

One of the first visible patterns you will see when a large mortgage company goes under (most purchase internet leads, data, etc.) is the lack of leads from the smaller organic shops buying a more expensive media but typically producing a better quality lead.If you figure that most lead generators buy media based on expected future needs and those needs change due to losing a large client and/or several of them in a single month then it’s easy to see that in the near future you may be short of leads, or at least for some period of time, (figure one month).

I’m not sure I’d call it a knee jerk reaction by the lead providers. We all want spend our monies wisely and in areas that we hope will return the biggest investment. But when internet lead generators are used to having one large client buying hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of leads and then they lose that client they’ve not only lost a large part of monthly revenue but in most cases got stiffed for some very large bills. How much did companies like New Century and/or Ameriquest owe their lead providers when they went belly up?

One way to offset any possible drop in your daily lead volume is to run home to the big boys for a period of time. LMB, NexTag, Adteractive, Low.com all saw a net increase in the number of clients and leads sold in the days after New Century collapsed. Even with their loss of a large customer they will have a high inventory based on their past media buys and most of the time will be willing to part ways with them for a very reduced price; (March 2007 – Lower My Bills.com fire sales).

If you run home to mama and buy from them you may not initially notice this drop in volume but you will see some drop in the level of quality based on personal experience. I think we all prefer a borrower who was driven to us actively searching for a home loan on Google versus someone who answered a banner ad that claimed we’d give them a $300,000 loan for $700 a month payment, right?

Of course your Account Representative will tell you that they have certain levers to increase the number of leads you buy (Keep the same), why not raise your price or raise your LTV or take a different credit grade and possibly buy some purchase leads, LOL. All of these things can affect the quality of the borrower reaching your loan officers in the end and I would suggest staying way from any of them unless you are prepared to change some aspect of your business model. BTW that might not be such a bad idea in these changing times however it is not our plan.

If you cannot increase the number of states you are in or focus on driving different channels into your staffs hands by branching off certain product types from each provider and experimenting with different credit grades and LTV’s within those credit grades then you WILL need more vendors.

I will begin testing with 5 new providers this week alone to weed out what I suspect will be 4 of those companies. In the mean time I keep my fingers crossed that relationships with the AE’s of each firm and the constant monitoring of product types, daily flow etc, will keep us in the good graces of our providers.

Just remember when the lead providers are not selling leads because we are not buying them we will all lose in the long term. Which providers will you invest in today so they are around tomorrow?

Best of luck to all of you still fighting the fight!