You’re not buying borrowers. You’re renting them.
Marketplaces and lead aggregators send one application to a crowd of lenders at once. The owner’s phone lights up, the fastest or cheapest offer wins, and your team spends its week racing competitors for borrowers who were never yours to begin with.
Brokers bring deals, at a price: a fee or points on every one, often again at renewal, and a borrower relationship that stays theirs. Referral partners help, but they send what they send, when they send it. Neither is a pipeline you control.
And the cheap channels are burned. UCC lists sold to every shop in town, aged leads dialed over and over, and so much funding spam that strong owners ignore anything that looks like a loan offer. The ones who still answer are rarely the ones you want to fund.
