I just got off of a very interesting phone conversation.  Who called me?  A very arrogant "acquisition" manager from a very large, very well known lead aggregation company.  It seems they want to buy my company because they don’t like the fact that we are actually helping Realtors across the country develop their own internal lead generation systems and it is apparently affecting their business in a few choice markets.  Now, whether or not this is actually true remains to be seen, maybe they just don’t like me openly discussing my distaste for them and other companies like them on public online forums and they want to shut me up.  But, either way, they want to offer me a very, very significant amount of money to"acquire" the business that I have built the past 12 years.  I politely declined and the ‘acquisition’ manager arrogantly said, well one way or another we are going to take over your business, ok, whatever:)

There were a few other items discussed on this phone conversation and one of the subjects was why don’t I just take the money and retire, after all everyone else in the industry is "selling out".

Really, do we really have sell outs in our own industry.  More than you can even imagine.  Open up the pages of any of the few major publications in our industry, notice who the "major" advertisers are in those publications.  That’s right, the same lead aggregation company that called me today among others.  Now I have but one question to ask these trade publications,
"If your goal is to help us as Realtors to better our business, why on earth are you promoting the very companies that are one of the major sources of agent failure and scams in our industry, Why????"

I’m sick of it, if your going to act like you give a damn about us as Realtors start showing it by being a little more selective about who you allow to advertise or even post articles in your publications.  I saw an article in one of these publications last month written by a guy who is one of the biggest proponents of people not using an agent when selling their home, yet, a Realtor specific publication is allowing articles from this guy because he has some stupid product that he conjured up this month to sell to Realtors, give me a break!!

End of rant, but I am not done on this subject!!