- 1The national trigger leads law takes effect March 4
- 2Congress passed the bill; credit bureaus will no longer be able to sell such leads
- 3LendingTree CEO Scott Peyree says applicants could get 50 to 60 calls
A national law curbing so-called trigger leads takes effect on March 4. Congress passed the trigger leads law, and it ends a practice that LendingTree CEO Scott Peyree described on the company's Q4 earnings call.
What trigger leads are
Peyree explained the mechanics with a mortgage example. LendingTree develops a lead and sells it to mortgage providers. A provider then makes a hard credit pull to give the consumer a firm offer. The credit bureaus then trigger those pulls to be sold to a group of third-party buyers that neither LendingTree nor its clients have any association with.
The effective message to those buyers, in Peyree's telling, is that a consumer just had a hard pull from a mortgage company and may be worth a call.
Why Congress acted
Peyree called the result a horrible consumer experience: people about to close on a mortgage suddenly get another 50 or 60 calls from unknown companies. Congress passed a bill, he said, so that can no longer happen, and the change is now arriving.
Source reporting: deBanked.
