Texting Leads Without Breaking the TCPA

Text messages get read and calls do not, which is why every agent moved to texting. The Telephone Consumer Protection Act did not move with them. The rules are not complicated, but the damages are per message, and that arithmetic is what makes carelessness expensive.

What the law actually restricts

The TCPA restricts automated calls and texts to mobile numbers without prior express consent. Statutory damages run per message, which is why plaintiffs bring these cases and why a bulk send is a different risk from a single text.

Marketing messages require prior express written consent, a higher standard than the consent needed for purely informational messages. Most agent texting is marketing whether it feels like it or not.

A number on a public listing is not consent. Neither is a business card, a sign call, or a name passed to you by a third-party lead vendor.

Consent must be to you, not to the aggregator who sold you the lead. A checkbox on somebody else's website naming fifty partner companies is exactly the consent courts look at hardest.

Getting consent that holds up

Manual, individual texts sit differently from automated ones, and much of the litigation turns on what counts as an autodialer. That is a moving legal question and not a safe place to build a strategy.

The National Do Not Call Registry applies to telemarketing calls, and an established business relationship has limits on how long it lasts. Scrub before campaigns rather than after complaints.

Capture consent at the point of enquiry, in writing, with the language visible above the button rather than buried in a linked policy.

Log it. Date, time, source, IP, and the exact wording they agreed to. Consent you cannot evidence is consent you do not have when it matters.

Practical habits

Honour opt-outs immediately and permanently, across every system. Continuing to text somebody who replied STOP is the single most indefensible fact pattern.

Identify yourself in the first message. It is good practice, it is required in several state analogues, and it reduces complaints regardless of the law.

State law adds to this. Florida and Oklahoma among others have their own statutes with their own thresholds, so the federal rule is a floor rather than the whole picture.