cellini's Diaryland Diary ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- My Incredibly Awesome Business Idea Tonight is the Rufus Wainwright concert. Neko Case is opening. I can't decide whether this lineup is a little too mild for me. I remembered to bring the CD burner in today. During lunch I'll look for a USB cable and fire it up. Oh, another very nice thing happened yesterday afternoon. I don't feel like getting into the whole explanation behind it, but basically I got a five thousand dollar bonus which is setting everything very much straight. There are a lot of very tempting things I could do with that but what I will be doing is taking $1,000 of it to clear out a bunch of nagging bills (like monster co-payments for the baby's emergency medical stuff and surgery). Then I'm taking the other $4,000 and using it to pay off the whole remainder of the loan for my wife's car. Usually I pay cash for cars and I don't think I'll be making the mistake of financing one again. My big issue, as always, is cash flow. I would rather have $200 of additional income every month than $5,000 in one lump sum. Getting rid of a monthly car payment effectively does that. Oh! I haven't written about it here yet but I had a lovely idea for a business a few days ago. My friend Farrell just got this crazy offer from a cell phone company. They want to put a cell phone tower on his property. It would be about the size of a telephone pole. In exchange for this, they will pay his mortgage for the next 25 years. And maintain his driveway to ensure year-round access to the tower. Naturally, he is totally doing it. So this got me thinking that I might be able to get a similar deal because there is no cell phone access where I live and I have enough land that you could stick a tower on a corner of it and I would hardly ever even see it. So I did some research and wound up talking to 7 different cell phone companies and tower lease brokers. They all have my info now and I could very well get an offer from one of them in the next few months. In the course of learning about this I realized that one could make rather a lot of money this way. The key to it all is having property that is sited just right with good elevation, paved road access, easy grid access and it has to be someplace where another tower isn't already covering the area. Also it has to be close enough to either a densely populated area or a heavy commuter route. So here is what I want to do: there is a google map with most of the cell phone towers in America plotted on it. I will look for towns in my general area of the state that have few or no towers. I will find markets that have spotty or no cell phone coverage despite having high enough population to warrant putting a tower there and selling them cell phones. Then I will get more specific and pull out a topographical map of that area from the US Geological survey. That will show me the most likely spots to put a tower. Having narrowed the geography down to a given square mile or less, I will then get tax maps from that County's government (also often available online) and look for very small parcels of vacant land on these elevated areas. Then I get the names and contact information of the owners from the County (public information). I contact each of them and make them an offer for the parcel. Ideally, I will be going after land that does not perc for a septic system or for some other reason cannot be used to build a house on, which will dramatically lower the value. But I won't just make the offer to buy immediately. I don't want to risk buying a piece of land and then finding myself unable to get a single company to put a tower on it. So what I will do is ask the property owner to sell me an option to buy. This means that I give him, say, $500 for an 1 year option to buy his 2 acres of land for the agreed price of, say, $20,000. He gets the $500 right away no matter what. And I have the right to buy or not buy that piece of land for that price at any point in the next year. Maybe I don't buy it and he just gets $500 for nothing. The point of the option is that I have then capped my risk at $500. As soon as the ink is dry on the option, I pick up the phone and start marketing the property as a tower location to cell phone companies. Typically, these leases are for no less than $1,000 a month. So as soon as I get one company to offer a contract, I can go ahead and exercise my option to buy the land without any serious risk. I could finance the real estate for about $300 a month for a monthly profit of $700. Note that once I have the lease signed and have acquired the land, there is literally nothing left to do except deposit the checks every month. The towers and equipment belong to the cell phone company and they are responsible for maintaining access. I'd be a landlord with no duties whatsoever. No buildings to maintain. Property taxes would be basically nothing because I would not own any improvements on the land. Here's where it gets really fun: I can put up more towers at the same location. If I sell a lease to Verizon, I can then go ahead and sell another lease to Nextel or whoever. And so on. If enough cell phone companies want to get into that market, then I could be getting $4,000 a month in total tower lease income for a single property. Thousands of dollars in monthly income indefinitely for absolutely no work after my initial research and marketing. If it worked well enough, I'd hit the maps again and find more properties to do the same thing with. This is just the best idea I have had in ages and ages. I can start on it this weekend. All I have to do is spend a lot of time looking at maps on the internet and then set aside $500 or $1,000 to buy an option on just the right piece of real estate. There is such a ridiculously low level of risk and such an insanely low amount of start-up capital needed that it's really the perfect new business venture. 10:49 a.m. - 2007-08-15 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
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