The lead you bought may not have consented to your call
In January 2025 a federal appeals court vacated the FCC rule that would have forced lead generators to collect consent one seller at a time. Most contractors read the headline as "nothing changed." What actually changed is where the risk sits.
What the rule would have done
The FCC's one-to-one consent rule was scheduled to take effect on 27 January 2025. It would have banned the practice of collecting a single bundled consent covering many sellers at once, and required that the consent be "logically and topically related" to the interaction that produced it.
In plain terms: the form where a homeowner asked about a roof could not also authorise calls from twelve roofers, an HVAC company and a solar broker.
Three days before it took effect, the Eleventh Circuit vacated it in Insurance Marketing Coalition Ltd. v. FCC. The court held that the FCC had stretched the statutory phrase "prior express consent" beyond its ordinary meaning: consent, at common law, is a willingness for conduct to occur, stated clearly before the conduct — not a form the agency may add conditions to.
Why "nothing changed" is the wrong read
The rule is gone. The TCPA is not. What the vacatur removed was a bright-line safe harbour that would have told you, mechanically, whether the consent behind a purchased lead was good.
Without it you are back to the general standard — and back to the situation where the person who dials carries the exposure. If a homeowner sues over a call, your company is the defendant. The vendor's indemnity clause is a contract between you and them; it is not a defence against the plaintiff.
That asymmetry is the whole reason this matters commercially. You are buying an asset whose defect only surfaces after you have used it.
Three questions to ask before you buy another lead
- Show me the consent record for this specific lead. Not the policy, not the template — the captured record: timestamp, IP or device identifier, the exact disclosure text displayed, and the URL it was displayed on. If the vendor cannot produce it per lead, you are buying an unverifiable claim.
- How many sellers were named in that disclosure? A list of "marketing partners" behind a hyperlink is the practice the vacated rule was written to stop. It is still legal to rely on. It is also the version a plaintiff's lawyer will enjoy reading to a jury.
- Who else received this lead, and when? Not a compliance question — a margin question. It tells you how many quotes you are about to be compared against before you spend a truck roll.
Any vendor worth using answers all three in writing. The ones who cannot are telling you something.
What this changes about owned demand
When a homeowner fills in a form on your own site, the consent record is yours: your disclosure text, your timestamp, your logs. You can produce it without asking anyone. You also know exactly how many other contractors received it — none.
That is not a legal argument, it is an operational one. The compliance question and the margin question have the same answer, which is unusual and worth noticing.
If you do run SMS follow-up, the mechanics still matter: consent should be affirmative and unchecked by default, it should not be a condition of getting a quote, and you should store the exact text the person agreed to along with the timestamp. Storing "consent: yes" proves nothing a year later.