Dirty Little Secrets Alarm dealers do not want you to know. Who owns your account?

Who really is providing your alarm system servicing and who is actually monitoring it.
It all comes down to who actually owns the rights to your account.

OK you decide to put an alarm in and you call XYZ alarm dealer down the street there nice and local and you like to help local business people but are you really ?
the answer comes down to it all depends.

I have always been an independent stand alone dealer who does not use any type of Dealer Program as there known.

I choose the equipment I choose how its installed and I choose where and who monitors it.
This is not the case with many alarm company's like XYZ who is involved in one of many different dealer programs out there.
Some programs the dealer sells your account outright to a company like ADT who gives the local dealer a Lump Sum payment for the account and the account becomes the sole property of ADT after 90 days of free and clear operation. At this point you deal with ADT for monitoring and service not the local guy any more all he did was install it.

Then theirs cases where the dealer will maintain your system and service it but sells the RMR
Recurring Monthly Revenue to a company like Monitronics which gives them a lump sum of cash
based on how much the account makes each month. Lets say your paying $30.00 a month and it costs a dealer $5.00 a month or less in many cases to get wholesale monitoring so he makes $25.00 a month in RMR he sells all or part of that RMR and gets paid cash for it so he can pay bills etc.
He can sell all or part of his accounts it all depends what he sets up with whoever he is going thru for a dealers program. or he may only sell part of his accounts each month and keep the rest independently

Some companys RMR is making them Hundreds of thousands of dollars each month so now you know how they can Give away so called FREE systems.
You pay for it in monthly monitoring fees.

With me being independent operator and not playing any of these games with funding my business , my monitoring generally is lower than others so yes it pays to shop around and get several quotes and ask plenty of questions where is my account monitored who is doing it who owns it and who is going to service it.
In many cases its often a sub contractor as many of these door knocking company's from Utah do not have a local service person they hire sub contractors like myself to do work for them.

If your blood is starting to boil a little bit I understand. Its the same old story Buyer Beware and due your homework.

I am always up front with customers on my monitoring fees and they know I make a couple bucks and it helps keep my business running and bills paid and I often give them free services such as Up/Down loading and programming etc as part of the monitoring fee like many company's do.
But some dealers charge for every little thing plus add a maintenance fee on top of monitoring as well.
But that's what makes the world go around this world is made up of many different people and business man.