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Some interesting situations have arisen in the first week of my lead purchasing survey. Being the cheap skate that I am I’ve kept my lead purchases at £5 each, and to date I’ve had eight leads sent via sms and email.

  Each Friday sees my debit card being attacked for the leads I have yet to pay, so my outlay has a gross of £40, not bad if just one comes off is it?   The start of the trial…   The intention was to plan for ten leads per month, that’s a massive £600 per annum, significantly less than what I’d earn from one case. Currently, two of the leads look positive so I anticipate they’ll progress forward. The clients are in support of going ahead with these leads, but it’s just my responsibility to get the financial side sorted.   You’d all laugh at one or two of these. There’s a publication in Pompey who wants £600,000 to purchase an asset at £600,000, with no other assets in place, don’t they do 100% any more he asked me.   Then there's the young couple from East Anglia, he's a carpenter and she's a hairdresser. They enquired about borrowing £595,000 to buy a guest house in the Scottish Highlands. When I asked what experience they've got she replied, “well I can do all sorts of hair styles, and he can make all sorts of furniture,” ...bless.   The beauty of this lead provider is that you have geographical control; I keep mine open as I'm not bothered where they are situated. I rarely get out to seeing them, at least not at the initial stage anyway. I collect sufficient details to assess if I want it and more importantly if I can place it, usually only takes a brief summary knocking up and 4-5 emails to potential providers.   False leads?   The second good thing is that the leads can be rejected on good grounds. To date I've had a couple of hoax enquiries (time wasters just fishing for information) and one that the telephone number was wrong, and they cancelled the £15 without fuss, leaving me with 5 potential clients.   Amiable service…   So in this early stage I'm impressed with the quality of the leads and the service the lead provider offers.   It's been another mixed bag as far as workload, development finance, commercial finance, bridging finance, and this week an asset finance enquiry. I'm happy with that as it's a long time since I've had my head around an asset finance case.   In this instance it's two expensive cranes as the assets (that's also new to me so looking forward to the research and knowledge that the research brings with it).   Another funeral…   And to finish, another funeral, I know that these haven't just died but they only went into administration I'm told late last year, although it's some time since they were lending. I'm talking about Catalyst, and when I first got into bridging, what they were offering at that time was very innovative and they had good products for both bridging and development finance.   So the list of lenders still alive and kicking is extremely small compared to my list of over 80 bridging lenders from a few years ago, but there's cracking bridging lenders and products out now, making golden hay while the clearing banks dilly dally around and refuse to lend.