One in Six Mortgage Transfers Became an Application on the First Call. The Vendor Says the Reason Was Time.

Nearly one in six of the transfers it bills turns into a mortgage application on the first call. The average call runs 14 minutes 41 seconds. The company says most others in the space report rates in the low single digits. My read: the extra ten minutes is the whole product.

What Radian Leads Put Out This Week

Radian Leads published updated Q4 2026 averages for the live transfer program it runs for mortgage lenders. The headline number: 17.6 percent of the transfers it billed ended with a mortgage application on that first call. That is about one in six.

The program covers homeowners shopping for a cash-out refinance through the VA, the FHA or a conventional loan, plus HELOC and reverse mortgage borrowers, and the company places those transfers with lenders nationwide. Its agents reach the homeowner first, before a lender ever joins the call. They confirm the caller owns the property, get a rough sense of the equity, ask what the money is for and settle on which product fits.

From there the homeowner is handed to a loan officer who holds a license, and that officer gets a short handoff first, so the call opens with the goal, the property and the product already known.

Now the number that explains the first one. The average call ran 14 minutes 41 seconds. The median ran 10 minutes 28 seconds. One in four transfers went 20 minutes or longer.

Nick Block, a co-founder of the company, framed the difference as what actually gets sold. His framing: most vendors in the space hand over a live connection and hope for the best, while his company hands over a real conversation. He added that no rival in the space is posting numbers like his.

That is the vendor talking about itself, so treat it that way. The interesting part is what the company says everyone else does.

The Baseline Is the Real Story

Here is the comparison the company draws. It says most others selling mortgage transfers report rates that sit in the low single digits, and that its own number is roughly six times higher.

Talk time splits the same way. The company puts the industry average at five to ten minutes per call. Its own average is close to 15.

The company's explanation is simple. A quarter of an hour gives a loan officer room to walk through the current mortgage, the debts and the equity, put a cash-out option side by side with a HELOC, and finish the application without a second call. Five minutes, by its account, often does not clear the introduction, which is why, in its telling, so many transfers end in a callback that never comes.

Follow the math and it gets worse. At 17.6 percent, it takes under six billable transfers to land one application. At the rates most providers report, one application then takes 30 or more transfers and about six times the acquisition cost.

None of that is really about mortgages. It is about what a first conversation is worth on any sales floor, including yours.

What This Means for an Owner Who Sells (My Read)

Picture a window and door company that pays for homeowner leads. A rep calls a homeowner who filled out a form the night before. She is friendly but guarded, and at minute four she asks the rep to just email her some information. The rep is off the phone by minute five and feels productive. My read: that is the five-minute call from the report, the one that barely clears the introduction, and the callback it promised is the one that never comes.

Run the same lead with a rep who stays on longer. She asks which rooms are the problem, gets a rough window count, hears that the front of the house bakes all afternoon, and books a 30-minute measure for Saturday morning before she hangs up. Same homeowner, same list, a longer phone bill.

Picture a mortgage broker who buys live transfers. One shop's loan officers convert near the top of the range the report describes, so under six billable transfers produce one application. Another shop's transfers land in the low single digits, so one application takes 30 or more transfers and about six times the acquisition cost. Two brokerages, same product, same homeowners on the phone. The difference is what happens in the first 15 minutes.

Radian Leads' answer is the conversation, which is a convenient answer for a company that sells conversations. I can't audit their leads from here. But the arithmetic is hard to argue with, and the experiment is cheap enough to run on your own floor this week.

How I Would Use This Week

1. Find your average first-call talk time. Pull the call logs for new leads from last month and average the length of the first call. If your phone system does not report call length, have every rep write the start and stop time on their next 20 first calls. It costs about 30 minutes of their week and hands you the one number this report is really about.

1. Set a floor and say it out loud. Pick the minimum number of minutes a rep stays on with a live lead before they can end the call. My read: if the industry average runs five to ten minutes and a five-minute call barely clears the introduction, your floor should be above ten. Tell the team the number, and tell them why it exists.

1. Give reps four things to get before they hang up. What the customer has now. What they want. What it costs them today. The next step, with a day and a time on it. A rep who cannot answer all four is not done with that call yet.

1. Listen to the first 60 seconds of five recorded calls. You are listening for one thing: how fast the rep gets the customer talking about their own situation instead of the product. If the rep is still on features at minute three, the rest of the call is damage control. Thirty minutes with headphones on, no interruptions.

1. Write the script down and let reps use it. Three openings I would start with:

• Window and door, first call: Ask which room gives the customer the most trouble with drafts or heat, then ask for 30 minutes on Saturday morning to measure and give a real number instead of a guess. Two questions, then off the phone.
• Mortgage broker, first call: Say you can price a HELOC against a cash-out refinance on the same screen in three minutes, then ask which matters more to the customer, the lower payment or the faster close.
• Mortgage broker, text after the call: Reference what the customer said about doing the kitchen first and the rest later, say you have two sets of numbers ready, and ask which one to send.

1. Start counting your own conversion rate. Out of 100 first calls to new leads last month, how many ended with a booked appointment or a started application? That is your transfer-to-application number. It does not need to match 17.6 percent. It needs to exist, and then it needs to move.

1. Ask your lead vendors for talk time and first-call conversion in writing. If a vendor cannot tell you the average length of the calls it hands you, you are buying connections. My read: connections are not what this report is selling.

Mistakes I See Owners Make

• Buying more leads before fixing talk time. More transfers pouring into a five-minute floor just means more callbacks that never come. The cheapest capacity you own is the minutes your reps already spend on the phone.
• Counting dials instead of minutes and outcomes. A rep can hit 60 dials and book nothing. Track average first-call length and first-call conversion side by side, because the two move together.
• Letting the polite brush-off end the call. When a homeowner asks you to send information by email, that is usually a no dressed up as a yes. It feels like a win to the rep, and it is the kind of call that, in the vendor's telling, ends in a callback that never comes.
• Judging a lead source by price per lead instead of cost per application. The company's own math makes the case: under six billable transfers per application at a high conversion rate against 30 or more at a low one, at about six times the acquisition cost.