Best equity release lead providers UK, ranked (2026)

Quick picks (pick one and skip the rest)

• Booked appointments that show up, no chase: MortgagesBooked (£110/show, no-show refunds automatic).
• Cheapest published cost-per-lead: RMT Direct (£90/lead, no VAT). Note their site states they're licensed in Gibraltar, not FCA-authorised.
• Clearest refund policy on paper: LeadCrowd (from £110/lead, 7-day refund window with written rules) or Digital Roo (replaces wrong numbers, hoaxes and duplicates).
• Best published screening criteria: MCB Digital Solutions (55+, minimum property value, LTV checks, all in writing, and FCA-authorised as a firm).
• Appointment-style calls with hard qualification claims: Smarter Clicks (over-60 ad rule, LTV filters, claims 90% contact rate; no price published).
• Skip if you want to know the price before a sales call: LeadJet, Financial Marketing, Lead River, Lead Genie, Lending Expert. None of them publish a number.
• Different animal: Adbetter is a marketing agency that runs your own ER campaigns for a fee, not a lead seller. Compare it with hiring an agency, not with this list.

The comparison table

Everything below is from each provider's own website, checked on 22 July 2026. "—" means not published. If a cell surprises you, click through and check, providers change terms without telling anyone.

The rankings, 1 to 12

Ranked on what each provider is willing to put in writing: price, exclusivity, screening, refund terms, and what you're actually paying for. The full criteria are at the bottom.

1. MortgagesBooked: best for showed appointments

Mine, so take the placement with whatever salt you like, but here's what I can point at. We publish everything the others don't: £110 per appointment that shows up, exclusive to one broker, screening in writing (55 is a hard floor in the qualifier, residential main residence only, and the applicant has answered a direct yes to releasing equity, not clicked a calculator). Property value, outstanding balance and postcode sit on the card before you claim. No-shows refund automatically, and there's no contract or monthly fee.

The honest weakness is volume. Equity release runs slower than remortgage or first-time buyer flow, so if you want 50 leads a week, a cost-per-lead provider will feed you faster. What the appointments model does is remove the dialling. Austin Durant, a later-life adviser, claimed five of these appointments, converted around 60% of them, and wrote roughly £11k in commission from two completed cases with a third in the pipeline. His case study is here in his own words, and the equity release leads page has the full screening detail.

2. LeadCrowd: best cost-per-lead paperwork

The only ER specialist besides RMT that shows you a price before a sales call: from £110 per lead ex VAT on fixed bidding, or roughly £80 of ad spend plus a £30 fee on their sponsored model. Exclusivity is stated plainly and the refund policy is the best-documented in the market (7-day window, written rules on wrong numbers, hoaxes and duplicates, refund rate reportedly under 7%). The gap: no published age, property value or LTV screening. You're buying verified contact details for someone who enquired, and the qualifying is on you.

3. RMT Direct: cheapest published price, read the licence line

£90 per lead, no VAT, with weekly in-arrears billing, and their testimonials are unusually specific (one adviser reports converting around 27.5%). Two things to weigh. Their site states RMT Group Limited is not authorised or regulated by the FCA and operates under a Gibraltar licence, which isn't automatically a problem for buying marketing leads but is worth knowing before you wire money. And there's no written exclusivity or refund policy on the site. Ask for both in writing.

4. Smarter Clicks: appointment-style, boldest claims

Their product is closer to ours than to raw CPL: booked call-backs where the prospect is "expecting your call". The qualification claims are the strongest of any CPL provider (every ad opens with an over-60 question, LTV filters, England-only, multi-step forms, no calculator leads) and they claim a 90% contact rate and up to 35% sales conversion. None of it is priced on the site, there's no written exclusivity claim, and no refund policy. If the claims survive a phone call, this is a genuine alternative; get the numbers in writing.

5. Digital Roo: solid mechanics, batch minimums

100% exclusive in writing, PIN-verified phone numbers, real-time delivery by email, SMS, API or portal, and a written replacement policy for wrong numbers, hoaxes and duplicates (scrub rate under 5%, they say). No published ER price, and the minimums are the catch: batches of at least 50 leads, at least 3 per day. That's a commitment for a sole adviser testing the water.

6. MCB Digital Solutions: best screening on paper

The only provider that publishes actual thresholds: 55+ (or custom age filters), minimum property values (their example is £70k+), non-standard construction filtered where possible, and LTV sufficiency checks. The firm itself is FCA-authorised (FRN 836323), unusual in this market, and they talk fluently about vulnerable-customer compliance. No published price and no written refund policy, which is what keeps them out of the top three.

7. LeadJet: clean exclusivity, campaign lead time

"Every equity release enquiry is assigned to a single adviser. No shared distribution and no competing callbacks." That's the clearest exclusivity wording in the market, and delivery is instant to email, CRM or webhook. It's a campaign programme rather than an off-the-shelf feed though: leads typically start a few weeks after launch, and there's no rate card or refund policy on the site.

8. Financial Marketing: good wording, thin detail

"We never sell your leads to another company" is exactly the sentence you want to see. Real-time delivery to email or CRM, leads graded by an account manager, over-55 targeting with property value used as a disqualifier. But no threshold numbers, no price, no refund policy, no conversion data. A shortlist candidate you'd need to interrogate on the phone.

9. Lead River: strong guarantee, odd cadence

The best money-back wording of the CPL pack: invalid leads are free, and if you order 100 leads you get 100 viable ones or a refund. Ordering runs in weekly batches (order Friday, delivered across the following week), leads arrive pre-educated about equity release, and one adviser testimonial reports 2 clients from a batch of 10. No exclusivity claim anywhere on the site, which for a 55+ audience is the first question I'd ask.

10. Lead Genie: one claim, little else

100% exclusive per the homepage, real-time delivery, cost-per-lead model. That's genuinely all the site tells you: no price, no screening criteria, no refund policy, no conversion evidence. Not a red flag as such, just a blank form you'd have to fill in yourself before spending anything.

11. Lending Expert: panel access, not a price list

A comparison site that passes its own equity release traffic to a panel of approved brokers. Real-time delivery from their own pages is plausible quality, but nothing is published: no price, no exclusivity statement, no screening, no refund terms, and you have to join the panel to find any of it out.

12. Adbetter: an agency, not a lead seller

Ranked last only because it doesn't belong on a per-lead list. Adbetter runs equity release ad campaigns for you as a performance agency (fee as a percentage of ad spend, with a 5.3x return-on-ad-spend case study for a lifetime mortgage client). If you want to own your pipeline and have £2k+ a month of ad budget, compare them with other agencies. If you want leads next week, look higher up this page.

Three ways to buy equity release leads (and the maths that separates them)

Every provider above fits one of three models, and the honest comparison is cost per conversation, not cost per record.

• Cost-per-lead. £90 to £110 buys a contact record. If your contact rate is 50 to 70 percent (typical when you dial fast), a £90 lead is really £130 to £180 per actual conversation, and the dialling time is yours. Works at volume with a disciplined phone operation.
• Booked appointments. £110 buys a conversation that's already in the diary, and with pay-per-show, one that happened. Cost per conversation equals the sticker price. Lower volume, no chase.
• Agency campaigns. You fund the ads, the agency takes a fee, you own the pipeline. Cheapest per lead at scale, slowest to start, and all the risk (compliance included) sits with you.

I've written the longer version of this maths in the mortgage lead cost guide, and the general market (all lead types, 13 providers) is covered in the main comparison.

Red flags specific to equity release leads

• No exclusivity statement. Three of the twelve don't mention exclusivity anywhere. A 55-plus homeowner who fills in one form and gets four advisers calling is a complaint waiting to happen, in a product line the FCA already watches closely.
• Calculator leads. Someone who clicked "how much could I release?" out of curiosity is not an equity release enquiry. Ask every provider how they separate curiosity from intent. (Smarter Clicks and MortgagesBooked both gate on this explicitly; most don't say.)
• No screening thresholds in writing. "Qualified" means nothing without numbers. Under-55s and £60k terraces with 90% LTV outstanding can't proceed, and you'll pay for them anyway unless the refund policy says otherwise.
• Licensing you haven't read. One provider on this list states plainly it isn't FCA-authorised and bills from Gibraltar. Legal, disclosed, and something you should consciously decide you're fine with rather than discover later.
• Prices behind a sales call. Ten of twelve. It's the industry norm and it's still a tell: if the price were competitive, it would be on the page.

How I ranked these

I run Bluewave Mortgages and I built MortgagesBooked, so I have a horse in this race. To keep it useful anyway, the ranking only counts what each provider publishes on its own website, checked page by page on 22 July 2026. Five criteria, equally weighted: a visible price, exclusivity in writing, screening criteria in writing, a refund or replacement policy in writing, and whether you're buying a contact record or a conversation. No mystery scoring, and if a provider updates their site tomorrow, they move. Corrections welcome, the contact details are in the footer.

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