Articles

With Flipping single family homes a thing or the past, it’s time to examine other real-estate oriented options for more fertile territory. One area that is often overlooked is outdoor billboard media – basically big signs that advertise located on highways and roads.

When I drive down highways today, I am always saddened by all the billboard operators who are taking pretty good billboard locations and wrecking them with poor sign face alignment. This art seems to be getting progressively forgotten and underappreciated.

When I first got in the billboard business, I assumed that the taller the sign, the better the sign. When I was driving down the interstate and I saw a really tall billboard, I would think to myself “now there’s a valuable sign”.

Sure, everyone has a billboard face with poor visibility. Maybe you built the sign for the great visibility of the other side, or maybe it was a great read at one time, but there is at least one bad advertising face in every portfolio. So what do you do to maximize that one clunker?

Is our nation in a recession? If so, that signals a great buying and building opportunity for billboards. Some of the greatest billboard buys and builds in history have come as a result of an economic downturn. Why? The reasons are numerous:

Periodically, you will come across the landowner of a potential billboard location that throws up an unusual response: “it’s not enough money”. But not in the “I want more money” argument. That’s just a part of negotiation. Instead, the argument is “I don’t mess with anything that pays such little money, so get out of my office”.

You would be amazed at how many billboards you see advertised for sale that are illegal. Unless you know how the permitting process works, it is easy to get caught in this scam. Often it is not even a scam – the owner himself does not know that the sign is not legal. Often, illegal signs change hands several times until they are finally found out. By then, there is no chance for the unlucky owner to get any kind of return of their investment.

It is very intimidating to look for your first billboard location. You feel like you don’t know what you are doing, and that you can’t possibly compete with the big companies. There is a simple exercise to cure you of these feelings, and start you on the road to building your own billboard company.

Great billboard artwork is a combination of simple concepts steeped in decades of research. As long as you follow these basic, time-proven steps, you will always deliver your client a billboard that is attractive and effective.

There are few business plans as lucrative as obtaining and selling billboard groundleases and permits to competitors. The financial risk is nearly zero, and the profits can be in the five figures. The only reason that every man, woman and child in the U.S. is not doing this is because 1) they don’t know the opportunity exists or 2) they don’t know how to do it