Im interested in buying property and putting up a billboard. Does the property have to be zoned for commercial use? What are the costs? What is the profit margin? Anything i should know?
You need to talk to your local zoning dept to find out where they can be placed and the restrictions on them (size, shape, height, etc).
So you are gonna have a team of people to put up new ads on the billboard and stuff and for maintenance? Did you ever work for a billboard company?
Im going to do whatever is required to run a billboard. I have never worked for a billboard company but i can imagine its like everything else in life, hard work and dedication.
I don’t think you need to worry about the actual task of putting ads up. Your job will be to secure the land and build the structure. Then you need to find a national advertising group to lease from you. Companies like Next Media, Garrett Outdoors, Infinity, CBS, etc have the clientel, you have the space to place their ad. Just be sure you are leasing the dirt cheap enough to be able to cover your costs easily and make a profit. To be sure you can do that you need to make sure you know exactly how much the advertisers will pay (this is directly proportionate to what they can charge). This is all 100% dependant on exactly how much traffic is going by the sign and the visibility. You may need to put down traffic counters or get in touch with the local highway dept to get traffic stats that you can furnish to the advertisers. Your first stop might be the companies mentioned above to find out what their needs are, what they might pay under different circumstances, where they are looking to place more ads, etc. Once you know this you can confidently shop for a place to stick the billboards.
Thanks for the information, do you think it would be worth putting up solar panels for lighting instead of paying for electricity?
ps. Im in Miami and there is always sun.
You’ll only be powering a few lights so I don’t think your bill will be very much at all each month. I think it’s safe to guess it would take a LONG time to pay back the investment in the solar panels and you will probably find that you need to replace them around the same time they finally pay themselves off. Think of it this way: If the electric bill each month is $30 and the solar panels are $3000 you would need to use them for 100 months to pay them off. I’m plucking numbers out of the air here but I imagine you might find the numbers not too far off. Check it out though if you want, just be sure to weigh the estimated electric usage against the cost of the panels. It’s easy to figure out how much it will cost to run the lights on the board to make your estimate:
Number of watts per bulb x number of bulbs / 1000 (1000 watts per killowatt hour if you didn’t know) x number of hours per day used x 30 (days in a month) x cost per kilowatt hour (it will show as kWh on your electric bill and should be somewhere between 10 and 20 cents a kWh depending on your electric supplier, check your home’s bill for the exact figure).
Seems like a long formula but it’s really quite simple.
Thanks, ill check it out. Do you know of any books i can read about billboard investing?
I know there is a book out there but I don’t know the author, someone here mentioned it before on this site. I haven’t read it though so I can’t tell you how good it is.