I met with a parade of their employees in their offices in Addison for about two hours a year or so ago. Amazingly, it seemed like each successive person I met with was younger and even more inexperienced and pretentious than the previous. I wasn't surprised in the least when "management" laid off a mass of 30+ employees, ditched their mortgage and title services, and downsized to a significantly smaller sized office earlier this year. They all seemed like a conglomerate of "too cool for school" kids playing on borrowed Highland Park money. It was only a matter of time before the music stopped and the game more or less ended for them. Sure enough, while the CEO was vacationing in Russia last December, 34 of his employees were being laid off. The real world and the real estate industry in total are a lot tougher than a Harvard business school case study. As it turns out, it takes more than just being connected to a few local deep pocketed investors and having a half thought out business plan foiled around a faulty, non-existent technological premise to scale a nationwide flat-fee real estate brokerage. Imagine that.