Let me break this down for you, as someone who owns one of those Security companies you berate.
As a consumer, you’re not awarded wholesale cost on anything in the security industry. In order to get this “Wholesale Monitoring”, you need to be a dealer. Which takes licensing. Some go as far to require that not only you have you Alarm Salesperson License but, Central Station Licensing, Alarm Installer Licensing, Resale License, and a Business License (LLC, S-Corp, Etc etc.)
**You’re correct in this. Most guess. There are those who highball and others who lowball when it comes to pricing. **
**Incorrect, GE and Honeywell do not have a monopoly on security systems. There are numerous brands out there in which if you do a bit of research, you’ll see they are separate Entities. Linear, Gemini, Elk, Etc.
**
Correct, there are. However, these companies require you have a system in order to monitor them. They will not install a brand new system for you at that price however.
**Here’s an industry secret (not so secret). You’re financing the system and the installation.
Why? Because consumers, however much they believe they can undercut costs. Do not know how to professionally install a security system themselves.
If you were to be inspected after a self install and you had placed the equipment in odd places and ran wire externally. You’d fail inspection and the city, county, or town where you live would revoke your permit on your system and issue a no response notice to your address where the system is installed. So when and if you ever had a break in. That nice, dirt cheap bill you’re paying, is money you’re just giving to the monitoring company for absolutely nothing. Because the police won’t be responding to your alarm going off.
Don’t believe me? Ask an ADT customer about their response times.**
Thanks for dropping past. It is useful to get some industry perception.
However if you re-read excavating (for a mind)'s post you might understand that he was not berating your industry at all. Rather giving a breakdown on how a low level operator might be able to scam money out of the system on the back of the efforts of the more mainstream industry.
We are assuming it works like this:
excavating (for a mind) or anyone else enters into a contract with AHSSolutions or some other provider for a three year contract. AHSSolutions comes in and professionally installs the alarm system. They then sub-contract the monitoring for say $9 a month, and charge $30 a month for the entire package. At the end of the three years they have probably only barely covered their costs. $21 x 36 months isn’t a lot to cover the equipment and installation. Nobody is getting rich here thus far.
Clearly the real thing is ongoing contracts.
So, along comes dirt cheap phone marketing, trying to find people with existing alarm systems that they can churn over to whoever they can get to pay them for the lead. With the promise of some sort of token upgrade to make it seem legitimate. So AHSSolutions suddenly finds that their customer isn’t going to renew with them, and has been snagged by some other operator. Possibly one who does no installations themselves, is little more than a name on an office, and does no more than simply pocket the profit.
Then again, maybe the industry is rife with fierce competition between legitimate operators who are desperately trying to churn one another’s customers in some sort of nasty zero sum game. (Lets face it telcos, and utility companies do this all the time.)
PS, it is a good idea to avoid the bold font. It seems to never do much more than annoy people who then don’t actually read what you write, and respond more to the bold font than the words.
snicker I ought to screw with the next one that calls me … I worked for ADT/Wells Fargo and know more about historical systems than the average person needs to. I could go on and on about the McCulloh Loop system that is installed and ask if they are replacing it with a newer DACTs system
“I’m calling from GE. We are the company who made your security system. If you remove the keypad unit and look on the back you will that it says GE.”
“You actually work for GE?”
“Yes sir.”
“How do you know that I have a security system that was made by GE?”
“Bullshit bullshit bullshit ahem and more bullshit.”
That’s a dead giveaway. Most likely they spoofed the CID, were actually based in Pakistan, and the local number didn’t exist, but was calculated to throw you off. Why the random “V-” number, I don’t know, but I see a lot of those, possibly from the same source. Many boiler rooms sell anything anyone hires them for, from credit card scams to fraudulent home fixin’s.
If you ever doubt this, ask them to supply their business address. Either they will hang up or give a fake address which you can easily verify with Google, often in your neighborhood. It’s amazing how many invisible 100-story skyscrapers are in farmer’s yards next to the pig sty.
Once they get that drone problem licked, you’ll see pizza being sold, too. Very cold pizza, missing the pepperoni, for $200/slice and no way to complain.
Welcome to the 'Dope! I hope you stick around and are not just a one-post-wonder. In the off-chance that you do stick around, please allow me to respond to the assumptions you so quickly jumped upon.
First, I did not berate any “Security companies”. If you read any criticism into what I had posted, it came from you. I was just trying to explain why I felt the call described by the OP was someone fishing for home security monitoring clients.
I never said a consumer could get “Wholesale Monitoring” (or Wholesale anything, for that matter). I don’t think it is even implied from what I had posted. In fact, the intent behind wholesale costs is that they are not available to the consumer. IME, anytime you see “Wholesale Cost” aimed at the consumer, it is just marketing, as nobody can afford to sell anything for what it costs them. I mention the wholesale cost of monitoring just to show how much margin there is in providing that service. Even at the bargain basement pricing of $15/Mo, that’s nearly a 50% margin. Not bad, but you’re going to need a lot of volume to make any money at it.
OK, you registered and posted to tell me that I was correct. Thanks.
Well, I was using a figure of speech. Aside from that, when two companies share a market it is called a duopoly, not a monopoly, but being a businessman, you’d know that. I would go out on a limb and say that GE and Honeywell combined account for the lion’s share of home security systems that are over 3 years old. My point was that if someone was to cold call someone who had a home security system that was over 3 years old and were to guess it was made by GE, they would either be correct or able to bluff themselves out of it a large number of times.
Thanks for pointing out that I know what I am talking about. Coming from a professional in the field, it suggests that I am not just making this stuff up. However, I never said (or even suggested) that anyone would install a system for the cost of monitoring. The OPs telemarketer asked if the system was more than 3 years old, remember? My guess is that if CookingWithGas had stayed on the line long enough, they would have asked who was currently providing the monitoring.
As you say, that really isn’t a big secret and I, personally, don’t have a problem with that. I doubt many others do, either, since it is a fairly common business model, shared with cell phone companies, satellite TV service providers, among others. What people perhaps are not aware of is that once the initial contract is satisfied, the cost (to the security systems company) goes down, but the price (to customers) does not.
Whoa! Who ever said anything aobut a self-installed system? Where’d that come from?
Well, when it comes down to it, even if you paid the top dollar ADT bill, it would likely be for absolutely nothing, since well over 90% of the alarms are false and an arrest is only made in something like 4% of those that aren’t. No, the value of a home security system isn’t that the police will come and stop the crooks before they can steal any of your stuff. The value is that most home burglaries are crimes of opportunity and that if the crooks know you have a security system, they’ll look for some other opportunity.
I can only guess why you wouldn’t want us to ask an AHS customer. (and I rarely use emoticons)
(and I rarely use emoticons)