The thing is, they CAN'T complete a lot of these searches online, which is why they are trying to get me to just fetch old deeds, check judgments where 20 years of images don't exist, and do recordings. I don't know of a single abstractor in my counties that would be willing to do this kind of work, especially on a daily basis. They only way they kept me doing it for awhile is because they LIED to me, leading me to believe this was a temporary situation based on "slowness".

It will be interesting to see what happens in these 3 counties, because the word has already gone out that if any of the abstractors in thse counties are contacted by DTS, all they can expect are retrievals and recordings, and even THOSE at a lower price than you get from any other client.

For example, they negotiated a price with LSI for recordings that only gets me $22. My regular price is $30. To do one in Bedford is a 130 mile round-trip. If there's a problem with the recording, they REFUSE to pay an additional trip fee. You have to eat it and make a second trip. Since Bedford is a county with everyting online, I only went there to do the recordings. NOW, they expect me to keep going there to do recordings that I actually take a LOSS on, while no longer sending me searches.

And this company was at least 65% of my business. They used to be insignificant. LSI was my client in my counties, and DTS managed to contract with them for the whole state. They did it by undercutting the independant abstractors pricing, then coming back to us to negotiate all our prices down. So LSI is paying more, and I am making less, than when they were my client directly. DTS is only my #1 volume client because they snatched away LSI from me two years ago. Now they've cut me out of the loop altogether.