Imitation: sincerest form of flattery

Recently, Todd Ewing, the founder & president of our company commented on how being copied is a form of flattery. While I do not wholly disagree, I do want to point out that it is a bit disappointing to see our competitors try so hard to copy our every move without even trying to pretend that it was their own original idea.

What am I referring to? Well, here are some of my favorite examples:

Last year we discovered that a title company in Rockville had lifted word-for-word entire pages from our website. This was the most obvious and egregious offense, since the company did not even bother to remove our name from the pages – on the bottom of each page it said “For more information, contact Federal Title & Escrow Company, 202-362-1500, info [at] federaltitle.com.”

We thought about not saying anything to them since, after all, if their clients had questions, they would be contacting us for the answers! But in the end it was just too great a transgression to ignore, and we contacted the company and had them remove the stolen information.

Almost two years ago, a title company that is a direct competitor of ours decided to copy and paste our REAL Credit™ program onto their website. They at least had the decency to change the name of the program, but they used our exact same credit chart, not altering a single figure. Even the color shading was the same! Of course, their website pretends that this was their idea…

Recently, while comparing competitor’s fees on the Internet to ensure that our fees were among the lowest around, we came across another competitor that lifted language word for word from our quote page.

The format of the final quote was identical to ours, except for one glaring omission – they removed the REAL Credit from the quote, making every purchase quote higher!

The reason I am pointing all this out is that Federal Title has always been a market leader, setting trends and combining quality services with low fees. We have dedicated a considerable amount of time and money on creating a transparent and informative website.

Rather than just sitting back and copying our competitors, innovation and technology have always been at the forefront of our business model. When selecting a title company, wouldn’t you rather go with the company that sets the trends and is recognized as the market leader?