Because I write for real estate and mortgage professionals on this site, I get a great many emails wanting me to look at products and services that are sold to those professionals. I get far more than I'm able to review, but I try to get to as many as possible.
One email asked me to take a look at a mortgage calculator offered free for real estate websites. The site offered a number of calculators, some straight HTML, some javascript, and a widget for WordPress as well. Not all took the visitor to a site with marketing, but the calculator this site featured, and the one offering the most mortgage information to the site visitor, featured a LendingTree ad at the bottom of the mortgage results page.
I liked the calculator, and really liked the results page, as it gave a lot of information, including an amortization chart, for the loan as entered by the site visitor. The real estate professional gets the embed code to easily place this calculator into their site for their visitors to use. So, let's look at what could happen:
Because a large and prominent ad at the bottom of the results page presents great rates and services from LendingTree.com, the visitor is encouraged to use that link to receive quotes from multiple lenders. Once they go to the LendingTree site, they are also presented many opportunities to "Find a Local Realtor or Buyer Agent" in their search area.
Using this service, the visitor's information can then be funneled to a member of the referral network of real estate agents and brokers who have agreed to a fee as high as 35% of their commission to go to LendingTree's network at RealEstate.com. (© 1998 - 2007 RealEstate.com, a service of LendingTree, LLC. All Rights Reserved. from the site).
So, you are doing a great job of website content creation, SEO, maybe some PPC as well. You are doing well at traffic generation. You want your site visitor to have all the tools they need right there on your site, so you install this great mortgage interest calculation tool. They use it, click on the link to LendingTree, search for an agent there, and ... well, you know the rest. Either you or one of your competitors will end up giving up a big chunk of the commission to a third party lead generator. It's not important which site or calculator this is, as there are more out there that are probably doing the same thing. What's important is that you check carefully what you're putting on your site.
Don't buy back a lead you generated in the first place.
