A map of the supplier types operating in the New Zealand market, what separates them structurally, and the questions that expose which one you are talking to.
Suppliers in this market use the same vocabulary regardless of what they actually are. Exclusive, verified, high intent and local appear in all of their marketing, which makes the words useless for telling them apart.
The structures underneath are genuinely different, and the differences predict how the supply will behave.
| Model | What they actually do | Who controls quality |
|---|---|---|
| Owned-brand operator | Runs the consumer site, form and verification | They do, end to end |
| Aggregator | Buys enquiries from networks and resells them | Their weakest source |
| Affiliate or publisher | Generates enquiries and sells them onward | They do, for their own traffic only |
| Broker or agency reselling surplus | Passes on enquiries they cannot work | Whoever originally generated them |
The fourth is less discussed and more common than brokers expect. Enquiries that a firm cannot service, whether by region, product or capacity, are frequently sold on, and by the time they reach you they carry an unknown amount of prior contact.
One question does most of the work: ask for the live URL of the page the enquiry was submitted on. Not a description, not a screenshot.
An owned-brand operator sends it in the same reply, because it is their own website. An aggregator frequently cannot, because the traffic passed through hands they do not control. That single exchange tells you which structure you are dealing with more reliably than any part of a capability deck.
The follow-up that confirms it: Ask who owns the domain and check it. New Zealand Business Number register for the entity, public WHOIS for the domain, and the Financial Service Providers Register where financial services are involved. All three are free and take minutes.
A supplier running a clean operation answers all six with facts about their own business. The answers are not commercially sensitive; they are descriptions of how the product is made.
How Lead Foundry answers this: We are an owned-brand operator. Enquiries come from QuoteHub, which we own, the entity is checkable on the New Zealand Business Number register, and the source brand travels on every record.
Four structurally different types of supplier: owned-brand operators who run the consumer site and form themselves, aggregators who buy enquiries from networks and resell them, affiliates and publishers selling their own traffic onward, and brokers or agencies passing on surplus enquiries they cannot service. They describe themselves in near-identical language, so the structure has to be established by asking.
Ask for the live URL of the page the enquiry was submitted on, then check who owns the domain via public WHOIS and the entity on the New Zealand Business Number register. An owned-brand operator sends the URL immediately; an aggregator frequently cannot produce it at all.
They are bounded by the aggregator's weakest traffic source, and the model economics push toward selling each record more than once and keeping verification light. For a buyer whose constraint is volume rather than calling capacity, aggregators supply something owned brands often cannot. For a capacity-constrained broker, the same records consume the constraint fastest.
The New Zealand Business Number register for the entity, its directors and status, the Financial Service Providers Register where financial services are involved, and public WHOIS for who holds the consumer domains. Confirm the entity you checked is the one that will appear on your invoice.