Buying leadsSeptember 8, 2026 · 5 min read
Aged Leads: Who Should Buy Them and Who Should Not
Aged inventory is the cheapest contact you can buy anywhere. It is also the fastest way to convince yourself that lead buying does not work.
By Ryan St. George, Founder, RJ Webworks LLC
Aged leads get sold on price, which is exactly the wrong way to decide whether to buy them. The right question is not what they cost. It is whether your desk is built to work them.
What aged actually means
An aged record is a form fill that is some number of days old. The person asked for information about coverage, at a real moment, with the same consent capture as a real-time record. Then time passed.
Time is the only variable. A ninety day old record was generated by the same campaign, on the same landing page, as the one delivered forty seconds ago. Anyone selling you aged leads as a different quality tier is describing their sourcing, not the age.
Who should buy them
- Rooms with dialer capacity, where the cost of an attempt is close to zero.
- Agents building a long term follow up database rather than chasing this week.
- Anyone with time but not much budget, who can trade attempts for money.
- Teams training new agents who need volume to practise on before you hand them expensive inventory.
Who should not
- One agent with two hours a day. Aged will eat both hours and you will conclude, wrongly, that leads do not work.
- Anyone without a dialer. Manually dialing aged records is a bad use of a licensed human.
- Agents who need a sale this week to keep the lights on. Aged pays out over weeks, not days.
- Anyone uncomfortable with their own compliance posture on older records. Age does not erase your obligations.
How to buy them properly
Buy by dated bucket, not by a vague promise. You should know whether you are getting forty five to ninety days, ninety one to one hundred eighty, or older, and the price should reflect which one. If a seller cannot tell you the age band, they are selling you a pile.
Ask for deduplication against anything you have already received. Ask what scrubbing has been done. Then work the block twice, a few weeks apart, before you decide whether it performed.
Common questions
What contact rate should I expect?
Lower than real time, and it varies enormously by bucket, state set and how you dial. Judge a block on total cost per conversation rather than on any single day.
Do people remember filling out the form?
In the forty five to ninety day bucket, often. Past six months, usually not. Open by reminding them what they asked about rather than asking whether they remember.
Is aged inventory exclusive?
No, and be suspicious of anyone who says otherwise at these prices.
How big should a first order be?
Big enough to be a real test. A hundred records worked properly tells you something. Twenty tells you nothing except how you felt that day.
Can I text aged leads?
Only if your consent language and your own compliance review support it on records of that age. Check before you send, not after.
Aged leads reward patience and punish everything else. If that matches how you work, the economics are hard to beat.
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