A lead grade is useful information about a lead, but it is not a demonstrated close probability. What a grade price does give you is a clear economic bar: for each grade, divide the price plus your handling cost by the contribution a closed deal leaves you, and you have the lead-to-close rate that grade must reach to pay for itself. Whether it actually reaches that rate is a question for your own records.
What a DrivenSellers grade measures, and what it does not
DrivenSellers lists a fixed price for each grade of exclusive lead. The price is shown on the lead card before purchase.
| Grade | How DrivenSellers describes it | Listed price per exclusive lead |
|---|---|---|
| A+ | Most likely to sell soon | $349 |
| A | Very likely to sell soon | $249 |
| B | Could sell soon | $169 |
| C | Not likely to sell soon, or no clear plan | $99 |
The price is shown on the lead card before purchase and paid from the wallet. No membership is required for ordinary purchases. Optional plans do not change or discount the per-lead price. Grades come from DrivenSellers' published scoring of the seller's stated answers; no validation against outcomes has been published, so a grade is not a measured close probability.
DrivenSellers describes the grades in plain terms: DrivenSellers describes A+ as most likely to sell soon and C as not likely or without a clear plan. It also publishes the scoring model behind them: Each lead gets a 0–100 score from five parts (timeline up to 40 points, reason up to 30, room to make an offer up to 10, property fit up to 15, not listed up to 5); A+ is 80–100, A 65–79, B 45–64 and C 0–44.
| Score part (vendor model) | Maximum points |
|---|---|
| Timeline to sell | 40 |
| Reason for selling | 30 |
| Property fit | 15 |
| Room to make an offer | 10 |
| Not listed with an agent | 5 |
| Total | 100 |
Override rules apply on top of the points. An owner who is only checking the value, or has no timeline, is graded C. A home listed with an agent is a B at most. An asking price between 50% and 85% of the home’s value, when both are known, makes the lead A+. A missing answer adds no points and takes none away.
Three things follow for the economics:
- A grade is a score of the seller’s stated answers. It summarises what the seller said about timeline, reason, price and property, weighted as above. It is not a measured close rate. How and when those answers are verified is not documented publicly, and regrading is not described.
- No outcome validation has been published. The weights are the vendor’s design choice; nothing published shows how often A+ leads close compared with C leads. We have not seen outcome data by grade, and we do not assume a ratio.
- Bands are wide. A score of 45 and a score of 64 are both B and cost the same. Two leads with the same grade can differ a lot in the answers behind them, so read the card fields as well as the letter (Before purchase the card shows the grade, listed price, area, motivation, timeline, occupancy, repairs, listing status and equity; the seller name, phone and exact address unlock after purchase).
So the grade tells you which answers the seller gave and how the vendor weighs them. The break-even arithmetic below tells you what those answers have to be worth to you.
The close rate each grade price must clear
For a single lead, ignoring fixed costs for the moment, the expected contribution is
expected_contribution_per_lead = r × G − (P + H)where r is the lead-to-close rate, G the contribution per closed deal (before acquisition costs), P the price per lead and H the handling cost per lead. Setting it to zero gives the break-even rate:
r_break_even = (P + H) / GWith an illustrative $15,000 contribution per deal and $21 of handling per lead (the only example on this page):
| Grade | Listed price | Price + handling | Break-even lead-to-close rate | Bar relative to C |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| C | $99 | $120 | 0.80% | 1.00× |
| B | $169 | $190 | 1.27% | 1.58× |
| A | $249 | $270 | 1.80% | 2.25× |
| A+ | $349 | $370 | 2.47% | 3.08× |
Read the last column carefully. An A+ lead costs 3.53 times a C lead on price alone, but once the same handling cost is added to both, it needs only 3.08 times the close rate. Handling compresses the gap, because you spend it whether the lead is cheap or dear. The more it costs you to work a lead, the less demanding the higher grades become relative to the lower ones.
An $8,000 deal nearly doubles every bar
The bar scales inversely with contribution. If your typical deal leaves $8,000 rather than $15,000 (same $21 handling):
| Grade | Break-even rate at G = $15,000 | Break-even rate at G = $8,000 |
|---|---|---|
| C | 0.80% | 1.50% |
| B | 1.27% | 2.38% |
| A | 1.80% | 3.38% |
| A+ | 2.47% | 4.63% |
A thinner deal nearly doubles every bar. Use your own contribution, measured after rehab, holding, closing and selling costs, not a hoped-for figure.
The most you can pay per grade at your own rate
Turn the formula around and you get the most you could pay for a grade at a given rate:
P_break_even = r × G − HWrite your own rate assumption for each grade, then compare the result with the listed price. Leave a grade blank if you have no basis for a rate; a blank is more honest than a borrowed figure.
| Grade | Listed price | Your rate r | Your break-even price r × G − H | Clears the listed price? |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| C | $99 | |||
| B | $169 | |||
| A | $249 | |||
| A+ | $349 |
The decision is entirely in the r column, and r is what you do not yet know.
For a full test including fixed costs, use the lead budget calculator once per grade; the fixed cost spread across fewer, dearer leads lowers the price ceiling a little further.
Why a few hundred leads cannot tell a 1% grade from a 2% grade
At break-even rates like those above, outcomes are rare. A 1% to 2.5% lead-to-close rate means 1 to 2.5 closes per 100 leads, on average. Even a few hundred leads per grade gives only a handful of closes, which is too few to tell a 1% grade from a 2% grade with confidence. A single good or bad month will look like a pattern and usually is not.
What a fair grade comparison would need:
- Mature outcomes. Every lead in the cohort followed long enough for contracts to close or clearly fail.
- The same buyer and process. Different follow-up effort by grade will show up as a grade effect.
- Comparable markets and dates. A grade bought in one county in spring is not the same test as another in a different county in winter.
- Full costs. Price, handling and credits, counted the same way for every grade.
Until that evidence exists, the honest use of a grade is as a published score of the seller’s stated answers, priced by band, that you test against your own break-even bar, not as a forecast.
Five steps from break-even bar to observed cost per deal
- Measure your contribution per deal and handling cost per lead from past deals.
- Compute the break-even rate for each grade you might buy.
- Decide, before buying, which grades your experience suggests can clear their bar, and say so in writing.
- Buy a fixed number of leads, log every cost and outcome, and wait for outcomes to mature.
- Compare observed cost per closed deal in the cost per contract calculator, by grade, with the sample size beside it.
Listed grade prices make step 2 exact, and choosing leads individually holds the grade mix to the plan in step 3; that is a point about control, not about the grades’ predictive value. Two terms to note before a test: A plan gives no per-lead discount; leads stay at their listed grade price; 5 days from purchase to report an exclusive lead as not as described; an approved request credits the price back to the wallet. See DrivenSellers lead cards and grade pricesFree account required to view available lead details. No card needed. We're the team behind DrivenSellers.