Yes, you would still benefit if there were dividends to be paid from the growth of the business. I do not know how much that would be though.

These are all really great ideas that you have come up with. Stock exchanges are certainly something that could be considered. I am not a tax attorney, and I am not sure if there may be some tax advatage in doing it that way. However, that is something that should be considered. I know that with multi million dollar mergers very often part of the purchase takes the form of an exchange of stock. usually there is a valuation of the stock in question.

The big concern I have is as Robert pointed out below the level of participation by abstractors on this board. If we can not get enough involved to raise the required capital, the entire exercise becomes academic.

After reading some of the postings on this board though, I think things are reaching a critical stage. Our firm has held firm in our prices just as Lisa has indicated that she has. We no longer do business with a number of companies who wanted a lower price, and we have turned away other companies that wanted to haggle and offer prices that were sub market value. With the price of gasoline escalating, it is even becoming difficult to maintian the $50.00 rate for a current owner search. If we had to do the amount of driving that Lisa mentioned it would already be out of the question. A year from now we may no longer be involved in abstracting.Our firm is already moving into new areas to pick up the slack.
However, there may be other members of SOT that are not so fortunate.


There was something interesting on the news yesterday. Some of the local businesses in Connecticut have begun adding a gasoline surcharge to the prices of their goods and services. One of them (I think it was Dominoes Pizza) was adding $1.00 extra if you wanted your pizza delivered. This did not seem to raise any eyebrows. Yet, our clients do not seem to have gotten the message. They are still insisting on driving the market price to all time lows. If something is not done soon (such as what we are proposing) there may not be as many abstractors around next year to service their accounts.