A motivated seller lead is quoted at $30 by one person and $400 by another

Mostly it's what they're calling a lead, then the channel, then the market, in that order.

PPC means pay per click. You're charged when someone clicks the ad, not when they contact you. On seller-intent search terms, the ones where a homeowner types something like "sell my house fast" plus a city, the click can run anywhere from about $10 in a thin rural market to $60 or more in a metro with a dozen funded buyers bidding. A landing page that turns 8% of clicks into a form fill or a call at $40 a click puts you around $500 for one raw contact. At 15% conversion and $15 clicks you're near $100. Same discipline, same math, very different answers.

Then there's what counts. A raw lead is anyone who submitted a form. A qualified lead usually means someone who owns the property, wants to sell in some timeframe, and answered the phone. Agencies that quote $30 are almost always quoting raw form fills, often from Facebook lead forms where a person taps a prefilled button without much intent. Agencies quoting $300 are frequently quoting a contact who actually spoke to a human.

The number that decides whether any of this works is cost per contract, not cost per lead. If 25 raw leads produce one signed purchase contract, a $100 lead is a $2,500 acquisition cost. Before you sign anything, get the lead definition written into the agreement, because a vendor paid per lead and left to define the word will define it generously.

A pay-per-lead vendor quoted me $75 flat, which sounded clean until I got to the exclusivity clause. The lead goes to up to three buyers. So the homeowner gets three calls in ten minutes and you're competing on price with two strangers before you've said hello. Exclusive versions of the same product were quoted at roughly triple.

So when someone says "lead," is a phone call that rings for four seconds and hangs up billable?

@plumb it depends entirely on the contract. The decent ones set a duration floor, something like a call over 60 seconds counts, anything shorter doesn't. The bad ones bill on connection.

On the click side, I pulled the keyword planner for my metro and "we buy houses" plus the city name showed a top-of-page range in the $30s to $50s. That's an estimate and the real auction is worse, but it tells you $30 leads aren't coming from Google search in a city like mine.

This is the part that stopped me. If clicks are $40 and I've got $1,500 a month to spend, that's 37 clicks. Thirty-seven. At a good conversion rate that's three or four contacts a month, and at 25 leads per contract I'd wait most of a year for one deal while paying a management fee the whole time.

@tally your math is the reason most small budgets fail on search, and it's worse than you wrote. Google needs conversion volume to optimize. Under roughly 15 to 30 conversions a month the automated bidding has nothing to learn from and you're paying metro click prices for a campaign running half blind. The usual honest answer at $1,500 is to pick a smaller geography, three or four zip codes instead of the whole metro, so your spend concentrates.

Same dynamic in the trades. Emergency plumbing clicks in my area went past $80 and the small shops just stopped bidding.

One correction to the framing above. Cost per lead in a rural market isn't automatically cheap, the volume is just tiny. There might be 40 searches a month total for your term across the whole county, so you can win every one of them for $12 a click and still only get two contacts.

Land is the odd one out here. "Sell my land" and "sell vacant lot" terms are far less contested than houses, I've seen estimates in the single digits per click, and the counterweight is that search volume is thin enough that most land buyers end up on direct mail instead.

Nobody's mentioned branded search. Once a buyer has been around long enough that people type the company name, those clicks cost a couple of dollars and convert several times better than cold terms. It's a slow asset. Agencies rarely sell it because it takes a year or two to matter and they're judged monthly.

Lead cost only means something next to deal size. If your average spread is $15k, a $2,500 acquisition cost is survivable. If you're chasing $6k assignments on small rural houses, the same lead cost eats you. I'd want the agency to know my average spread before they quote me a target.

Reading all this, I can't tell whether search is the wrong channel for someone starting out or just the wrong channel at $1,500. @ledger's zip code point suggests the second, but four contacts a month still doesn't sound like enough to learn anything from.

Is there an equivalent for note sellers? Every example here is a homeowner searching. I can't picture someone holding seller-financed paper typing anything into Google at 11pm.

The question I actually came in with and never asked: if the agency defines qualified lead, and the agency gets paid per qualified lead, who checks? Do people actually listen to the call recordings and dispute them, or does everyone just accept the invoice? Because I'd never listen to 45 recordings and I suspect I'm not unusual.