Aged leads vs real-time leads: what lead age does to your contact rate

Lead age is the time between a person submitting a finance enquiry and that enquiry reaching the broker who will call it. Real-time leads close that gap to nothing: the enquiry is generated, verified and delivered as it happens. Aged leads sat somewhere first, for days, weeks or months, usually with other brokers in between, and are sold afterwards at a discount meant to reflect what the waiting did to them.

For a commercial finance broker the discount is rarely deep enough. The thing you are paying for, a business owner who wants finance now, is exactly what decays. Real time costs more per record and less per person you actually speak to. Aged lists have one narrow use, covered below, and it is not standing in for your inbound pipeline.

Contact rate is conversations divided by leads paid for. Four things happen to an enquiry while it sits, and each one pushes that number down.

• The need resolves itself. An owner who asked about equipment finance in May has, by July, bought the machine, leased it, found the cash or shelved the idea. Whichever it was, the reason they would have taken your call is gone.
• The number stops answering. After a few unknown callers, most people send anything unrecognised to voicemail. An aged lead has usually been through that already, so you are dialling into a habit the earlier callers created.
• The details drift. Amount, purpose and timeframe were true on the day. Three months on, the amount has changed, the purpose has been reframed for a different lender and the timeframe means nothing. You open the call with a brief the person no longer recognises.
• The enquiry was for something else. Much of what is sold as aged finance data was never a broker enquiry. It was a comparison form, a grant search or a competition entry, bundled and relabelled. The person does not remember submitting it and did not expect a broker to call.

None of this is about the seller's honesty. It is what time does to a record of intent, and real time is the only format where what you bought still exists when you call it.

Price per lead is the wrong axis for this decision, so here is the comparison in conversations, using hypothetical round numbers rather than anyone's published figures. Take 100 real-time, verified enquiries and assume you reach 70. Take 100 aged records and assume you reach 25, generous for anything over a month old that has been through other hands. Before a single application is written, the aged batch has to be priced at roughly a third of the real-time batch just to produce the same number of conversations.

It does not stop there. The 25 aged conversations open with 'who are you and how did you get my number', and some end with 'that was sorted months ago'. The 70 real-time conversations open with the amount and purpose the person typed minutes earlier. If aged conversations convert at half the real-time rate, still hypothetically, the aged batch now needs to be priced at under a fifth of the real-time batch for the same applications, and you have dialled more than five times as many records to get there.

Run the same sum with your own numbers using the method in cost per funded deal. The one input an aged-lead seller rarely has is a contact rate measured by lead age, which is the first thing to ask for.

Two situations. The first is an outbound operation built for it: a dialler, a team paid on conversations rather than settlements, and a script written for 'you enquired a while ago' rather than 'you enquired this morning'. It only works at volume and at a price that reflects the contact rate, and it is a different business from broking.

The second is your own aged data. Enquiries you bought in real time and did not convert are a list only you hold, with a history you know. A structured call-back to everyone who did not proceed six or twelve months ago is the one aged-lead campaign a broker should run. What aged lists are not is a cheaper version of live inbound, and buying them to fill the slot where this week's enquiries should be is where most disappointment with leads starts.

Sellers do not label leads 'aged'. They label them 'leads'. Five questions separate the two.

• Ask for the submission timestamp on every record, not the delivery timestamp. If it is not in the file, the age is whatever the seller says it is.
• Ask what the form asked. A finance enquiry captures amount, purpose and timeframe. A record with a name, a number and nothing else came from somewhere else.
• Ask whether the mobile was verified at the time of enquiry and whether it has been checked since. A code confirmed in March proves the number was live in March; what verification does and does not prove is in verified vs unverified leads.
• Ask how many times the record has been sold, and over what period. 'Exclusive' on an aged lead can mean exclusive from today, after other brokers had it live. The wider question is in exclusive vs shared leads.
• Ask for contact rate by age band. A seller who has never measured it is telling you something. A seller who will not show it is telling you more.

Age is now a regulatory question as well. ASIC reissued RG 234 on 9 June 2026 to expressly cover lead generators and search and social advertising (ASIC, June 2026), and the ACCC's report on unsolicited selling and lead generation (ACCC, July 2026) recommends bringing lead generation inside the unsolicited-selling rules. A record pulled from an unrelated form months ago and resold as a finance enquiry is the pattern both describe.

La Vitesse does not sell aged lists. Every lead is generated in Australia from our own Google and Meta campaigns, the prospect confirms their mobile by SMS code before the lead ships, and it is delivered to your inbox or CRM in real time, sold once and never resold; our published contact rate on that basis is 72.5%. If that is the format you want for SME working-capital, expansion and equipment enquiries, start with business loan leads, and for what to do in the first minutes after delivery read how to convert finance leads.