Start end-of-lease outreach 120 days before the lease end date and aim to book the appraisal or test drive between 90 and 60 days out. LeadsNow recommends 120 days because it gives four dated touches before the car is due back, while a dealer who starts at 30 days gets one rushed conversation in which to book the visit.
The short answer from LeadsNow AI: LeadsNow recommends contacting car lease customers 120 days before the lease end date, booking the appraisal or test drive 60 to 90 days out, and using the customer’s own purchase date in the DMS as the trigger for owned vehicles that have no lease date. Expect a lease-end list to book at roughly two to three times the per-record rate of a trade-cycle list on the labelled assumptions below, and treat consent, not timing, as the limit on how many customers you may contact at all.
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End-of-lease and trade cycle outreach at a glance
End-of-lease and trade cycle outreach means contacting a customer on a date set by their own contract or ownership history, not on a sales manager’s hunch, so the call arrives while the replacement decision is still open.
- The trigger: a lease end date (from your lease records) or a trade-cycle milestone such as 36, 48 or 60 months since the customer bought the car from you.
- The ladder: the 120-90-60-30 Lease-End Ladder below, four touches with one job each.
- The goal: a booked appraisal or test drive, counted per 100 customers entering the window each month.
- The gate: consent. Australia: the Spam Act 2003 for SMS and email and the Do Not Call Register for calls (ACMA). United States: the TCPA, including FCC Declaratory Ruling 24-17 on AI-generated voices.
- The scope: outreach timing only. Contract questions belong with the customer’s lease provider, not in these messages.
Rules of thumb
- At mid assumptions in the worked table, 100 lease-end customers a month book about 10 appraisals or test drives (7.8 from 80), against about 4 from 100 trade-cycle customers (8.6 from 240).
- Consent moves the result more than copy: lifting the contactable share of an 80-customer lease month from 60% to 80% adds 16 people you may message, about 2.2 extra bookings at mid rates.
- A Do Not Call Register wash protects calls made in the 30 days after it, per the register’s industry FAQs, so a list washed for the 90-day call must be washed again before the 60-day call.
- Australian telemarketing calls are limited to 9am to 8pm on weekdays and 9am to 5pm on Saturdays under the telemarketing industry standard, unless the customer agrees otherwise.
- In the US, an AI voice call that pitches a replacement vehicle is telemarketing, which needs prior express written consent (FCC 24-17, footnote 13).
How it works
How dealers time end-of-lease and trade cycle outreach
Export upcoming dates weekly
Pull lease end dates for the next 150 days and owned vehicles reaching 36, 48 or 60 months since purchase.
Tag the consent basis
Mark express, inferred or no consent per channel, and wash call lists against the Do Not Call Register or US rules. Records with none stay out.
Run the 120-90-60-30 ladder
Four dated touches, each with one job: name the date, offer a time, book the undecided, then return logistics.
Book appraisal or test drive
Aim to have the visit in the diary by the 60-day touch. Suppress non-responders until their next milestone.
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Frequently asked questions
How many months before a car lease ends should a dealer contact the customer?
Four months. LeadsNow recommends the first touch at 120 days before the lease end date and a booked appraisal or test drive by 60 days out, which leaves four dated touches before the car is due back.
How do I time trade cycle outreach for customers who own their car?
Use dates you already hold: 36, 48 and 60 months since you sold the car, and the manufacturer warranty expiry for that model. Start the same four-touch ladder 120 days before each milestone and suppress the customer until the next one if nobody replies.
Can I text lease customers in Australia without asking first?
Only with express consent or consent you can genuinely infer from an ongoing relationship that the message relates to. The ACMA’s spam guidance also says you cannot send an electronic message to ask for consent, because that message is itself marketing.
Do AI voice calls to US lease customers need consent?
Yes. FCC Declaratory Ruling 24-17 treats AI-generated voices as artificial voices under the TCPA, so calls need prior express consent, and prior express written consent when they offer a replacement vehicle.
How many appraisals should 100 lease ends a month book?
About 10 at the mid assumptions in the worked table, within a band of about 4.5 to 18. These are labelled assumptions, not a benchmark: no public benchmark exists on this denominator, so measure your own.
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The 120-90-60-30 Lease-End Ladder
The 120-90-60-30 Lease-End Ladder gives each of four touches, at 120, 90, 60 and 30 days before the lease end date, a single job, so no message asks for more than the customer is ready to give.
| Days before lease end | Job of the touch | Channel (where consent allows) | Ask |
|---|---|---|---|
| 120 | Name the date and the choice ahead | SMS, then email | “Do you want to see what replaces it?” Yes or no. |
| 90 | Offer a specific appraisal or test drive time | Call (human or AI voice), SMS follow-up | Two named times in the next fortnight |
| 60 | Book anyone still undecided; rewash call list | Call, then SMS | Two named times this week |
| 30 | Return logistics and a last offer to look | SMS | Return inspection time, or reply LOOK for a test drive |
The 60-day touch is the one that slips. Lease end dates often sit outside the sales CRM, so a monthly export can miss a 90-day window entirely. Export the next 150 days of lease ends every week, not every month, and the ladder has room for one missed touch.
The car dealership lead generation guide for Australia covers DMS extraction and the other trigger segments. This page covers only when to make contact.
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Worked example: lease-end and trade-cycle customers to booked appraisals
A dealer with 80 lease ends and 240 trade-cycle milestones a month books about 16 appraisals or test drives a month at mid assumptions, roughly half from each list despite the trade-cycle list being three times larger.
No public benchmark exists for end-of-lease or trade-cycle outreach on a customers-entering-the-window denominator, so every rate below is a labelled assumption in three bands. Replace them with your own numbers.
| Stage | Assumption (low / mid / high) | Low | Mid | High |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Lease ends this month | Customers 120 days from lease end | 80 | 80 | 80 |
| Contactable with consent | 60% / 70% / 80% | 48 | 56 | 64 |
| Reached (reply or conversation) | 30% / 40% / 50% of contactable | 14.4 | 22.4 | 32 |
| Booked appraisal or test drive | 25% / 35% / 45% of reached | 3.6 | 7.8 | 14.4 |
| Lease: booked per record | Arithmetic | 4.5% | 9.8% | 18.0% |
| Trade-cycle milestones this month | Owned vehicles at 36, 48 or 60 months since purchase | 240 | 240 | 240 |
| Contactable with consent | 50% / 60% / 70% | 120 | 144 | 168 |
| Reached (reply or conversation) | 15% / 20% / 25% of contactable | 18 | 28.8 | 42 |
| Booked appraisal or test drive | 25% / 30% / 35% of reached | 4.5 | 8.6 | 14.7 |
| Trade cycle: booked per record | Arithmetic | 1.9% | 3.6% | 6.1% |
| Total booked per month | Lease plus trade cycle | 8.1 | 16.5 | 29.1 |
The lease assumptions sit higher because a lease end is a date the customer already knows about; a trade-cycle milestone is a date only the dealer is watching. The reached rate carries most of the gap.
How to time trade cycle outreach when there is no lease end date
Trade cycle outreach for owned vehicles works from dates the dealer already holds: the sale date, the odometer at each service and the manufacturer warranty expiry for that model.
- Months since purchase: queue customers at 36, 48 and 60 months after you sold them the car, and give each milestone one ladder run, not three.
- Warranty expiry: warranty terms differ by brand and model year, so read each manufacturer’s own warranty page and start the ladder 120 days before that customer’s expiry date.
- Service visits: a large repair quote is a trade conversation for the service desk in person, covered in the dealership service history reactivation guide; keep it out of this ladder.
- Stop rule: after a full ladder with no reply, suppress the customer until the next milestone. Four unanswered touches at one milestone is a clear answer.
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What public data says about how long drivers keep their cars
S&P Global Mobility put the average age of US light vehicles on the road at 12.8 years in its May 2025 release, which measures the whole fleet, not how long one owner keeps a car.
That distinction matters for timing. The S&P Global Mobility release counts vehicles in operation (289 million) across every owner a car has had, so it tells you the US fleet is old, not when your customer will trade. LeadsNow could not verify a current public figure for average ownership length or average lease term, for either Australia or the US, on a clean denominator from a primary source today, so this page does not print one. Your own DMS sale dates and lease records describe your customers better than any national average.
Consent rules that decide which lease and trade customers you may contact
Consent decides the size of the contactable row in the worked table, and in both Australia and the US the rules differ by channel: messages, human calls and AI voice calls.
Australia. The ACMA’s guidance on avoiding spam says every commercial SMS or email needs express or inferred consent. Consent can be inferred where the person knowingly gave you their address and has a provable, ongoing relationship with your business that the marketing directly relates to; the same page says it does not cover messages sent after someone has just bought something from you. An active lease serviced through your dealership is a stronger basis than a car sold four years ago with no contact since. Every message must identify the dealership and carry an unsubscribe honoured within 5 working days. Calls are a separate regime: wash against the Do Not Call Register and keep to the calling hours in the rules of thumb above.
United States. FCC Declaratory Ruling 24-17, adopted 2 February 2024, confirms that calls using AI-generated voices fall under the TCPA’s artificial or prerecorded voice rules and need the called party’s prior express consent, and prior express written consent where the call is telemarketing. A lease-end call that offers a replacement vehicle is telemarketing. State rules can add more; this is general information, not legal advice.
What running the lease-end ladder yourself costs
Running the 120-90-60-30 Lease-End Ladder in-house costs about 7 staff hours a month in conversations at the mid assumptions above, plus a weekly export of upcoming lease end dates.
At mid rates, 51 customers reply or pick up each month (22.4 lease plus 28.8 trade cycle). At an assumed 8 minutes per conversation, including booking the time into the sales diary, that is about 6.8 hours. The hard part is the calendar: 200 contactable customers a month means about 800 touches on exact dates.
LeadsNow recommends a spreadsheet and calendar reminders below about 50 customers entering the window a month, and automation above it, where the dated touches outrun one person’s memory. If you would rather hand the dated touches over, LeadsNow has delivered 50,769+ AI-booked appointments and 1M+ leads, and the AI appointment setting page explains how it works. Providers are compared on the best appointment setting agencies for car dealerships in Australia list, and US marketing agencies on the best marketing agencies for car dealerships in the US list.