What NZ mortgage advisers pay per lead, what separates a good lead from a wasted call, and the checklist for vetting a provider before you spend a dollar.
Figures in this article describe the wider market and are drawn from the third-party sources listed at the end. They are not Lead Foundry results, and nothing here is a projection of what any individual broker will achieve.
Most New Zealand mortgage advisers grow on referrals and repeat clients. That works until it plateaus, and the next conversation is usually about buying leads to fill the gap. The difficulty is that lead pricing in New Zealand is almost never published. Suppliers quote on a sales call, the numbers move around, and a new adviser has no benchmark against which to judge whether a quote is fair.
This is that benchmark, along with the part that matters more: how to tell whether the lead behind the price is worth having.
No official New Zealand or Australian dataset on lead pricing exists. The ranges below are working benchmarks assembled from vendor quotes, international mortgage lead markets where the economics are comparable, and the published cost of generating equivalent enquiry through paid search. Treat them as a place to start a negotiation rather than as measured market data.
| Lead type | Working NZ range per lead | What you are buying |
|---|---|---|
| Shared, sold to several advisers | NZ$20 to $60 | A record, and a race against the other buyers |
| Exclusive, sold once | NZ$80 to $200 | A conversation nobody else is having |
| Self-generated through your own funnel | Your ad spend per enquiry | Full control, and the cost of building it |
The headline price is the wrong thing to anchor on. A shared lead at NZ$30 looks cheap beside an exclusive lead at NZ$150. Run both through to a settled loan and the ranking usually reverses, because the number of leads required per settlement differs by more than the price does.
The number that actually decides it: Cost per settled loan, not cost per lead. A supplier who will not discuss the second number is asking you to buy on the one that flatters them.
This is the comparison that gives a lead price meaning, because self-generation is the real alternative. WordStream's 2026 Google Ads benchmarks, drawn from 13,474 US search campaigns running between April 2025 and March 2026, put the Finance and Insurance category at an average cost per click of US$3.39 with a conversion rate of 2.64%, the lowest of any category measured, against a click-through rate above 9%.
That pairing is the whole story. Clicks in this category are affordable and most of them do not convert. An enquiry costs the click price divided by the conversion rate, and dividing by 2.64% is expensive. The all-industry average cost per lead in the same dataset was US$66.69, and Finance and Insurance sits worse than that average on the variable that matters.
| All-industry average cost per lead (US$) | US$66.69 |
|---|---|
| All-industry average cost per click (US$) | US$5.42 |
| Finance and Insurance cost per click (US$) | US$3.39 |
| Finance and Insurance conversion rate (%) | 2.64% |
Before you judge a lead price as high, price the alternative. Building the funnel yourself means carrying the click cost, the conversion rate, and the cost of building and maintaining the pages.
Price tells you nothing about quality. A lead is worth buying only if a real person with a real situation can actually be reached. Four things decide that, and every one of them is set before the record reaches you.
Was the phone number tested at the point of submission, or is this an unconfirmed form fill? The distinction that matters is between a check on the string and a check on the person. A format check confirms the number has the right shape. An SMS one-time code completed inside the form flow confirms a person holding that handset was present when the enquiry was made.
Is this enquiry sold to you alone, and for how long? A time-limited exclusivity window is the mechanism behind most recycled leads: the window closes, the record returns to a saleable pool, and the consumer takes their fifth call four months after asking one question.
Was the enquiry captured minutes ago or weeks ago? The MIT Sloan lead response research, covering more than 15,000 leads and over 100,000 call attempts, found the odds of contacting a lead fall by a factor of 100 between a five minute and a thirty minute response. A lead that is days old has already spent most of its value before you see it.
Did the person ask for a specific outcome, such as a refinance, a first home, or a rate review, or did they click an ad? A record carrying the consumer's own description of their situation lets you open the call by referring to it. A record carrying only a name and a number makes you start from nothing.
A lead failing any one of these is the kind that gives buying leads its reputation. It is also the kind most shared-lead suppliers sell, because the economics of selling the same record several times only work at high volume and low verification.
Faster than most advisers believe, and the evidence is unusually consistent. Harvard Business Review audited 1.25 million sales leads across 29 B2C and 13 B2B companies and found firms responding within an hour were roughly seven times more likely to have a meaningful conversation with a decision maker than firms responding an hour later, and 60 times more likely than those waiting a day or more.
The same audit found the average first-response time was 42 hours, and that 23% of firms never responded at all. The gap between what the research recommends and what most firms do is the opportunity.
Firms that tried to contact potential customers within an hour of receiving a query were nearly seven times as likely to qualify the lead as those that tried to contact the customer even an hour later.
Harvard Business Review, The Short Life of Online Sales Leads
Before you spend, get a straight answer to each of these. A supplier confident in their supply answers all of them without hesitating, because the answers are facts about their own business.
Where Lead Foundry sits, in plain terms: Lead Foundry currently supplies life insurance enquiries in New Zealand. Mortgage supply opens when LoanWatch launches. So this is a buyer's guide to the New Zealand mortgage lead market rather than an offer. The standards above are the ones we hold ourselves to on the enquiries we do sell: captured on a site we own, verified by SMS at submission, sold to one adviser, and replaced if they fail the criteria you set.
The FMA reports just over 3,000 financial advice businesses in New Zealand, made up of 1,807 Financial Advice Providers and 1,200 Authorised Bodies, engaging 10,743 financial advisers and 12,287 nominated representatives. 82% of financial advice providers are businesses with fewer than ten advisers.
That shape matters when you buy. A market of small firms means the constraint on most advisers is calling capacity rather than lead availability, which is why buying more volume than you can work is the most common and most expensive mistake in the category.
On the demand side, REINZ reported a national median sale price of NZ$753,106 in January 2026, up 0.4% year on year, with 9,019 new listings and a national median of 54 days to sell. RBNZ publishes new residential mortgage lending split by borrower type and by purpose, which is the closest thing to a free demand signal available to an adviser planning where to buy.
Run a structured trial rather than a purchase. Buy 30 to 50 leads, work every one of them through an identical six-attempt cadence, and measure contact rate before you measure anything else. That sample is enough to judge whether the data describes reachable people, and it is nowhere near enough to judge profitability, which needs a full sales cycle and a much larger sample.
There is no published New Zealand dataset, so any figure is a working benchmark rather than a measured market rate. Shared enquiries sold to several advisers typically quote around NZ$20 to $60, and exclusive enquiries sold once typically quote around NZ$80 to $200. The more useful comparison is cost per settled loan, since exclusive leads generally need far fewer records per settlement and can be cheaper per client despite a higher unit price.
For most New Zealand advisers, yes, because the binding constraint is calling capacity rather than lead supply. A shared lead means competing on who dials fastest, and the response-time research shows that race is decided in minutes. An exclusive lead removes the race, which protects the contact rate that drives everything downstream in the model.
Within minutes. The MIT Sloan lead response research found the odds of contacting a lead drop by a factor of 100 between a five minute and a thirty minute response. Harvard Business Review found firms responding within an hour were 60 times more likely to have a meaningful conversation than firms waiting more than a day. Your delivery method decides whether five minutes is physically available to you.
Yes. Buying consumer enquiry data is not prohibited. What is regulated is what happens next: you must hold or operate under a Financial Advice Provider licence to give regulated financial advice, you must meet the Code of Professional Conduct, and under IPP 3A of the Privacy Act 2020 you must take reasonable steps to make the consumer aware that you collected their information from a source other than them.