Outdoor Billboard Investment Articles

What is bigger than a bread box, made out of wood, and creates cash flow? The answer is a wooden outdoor billboard sign. No other pile of wood can create up to a 100% return on investment annually. So how does it work? Here’s the basic steps to building a wooden billboard.

he average billboard ground lease is 20 years. Since you only have one shot every 20 years to negotiate your ground lease, it is imperative that you do a good job at it. And it’s not something you are going to learn from experience – you will only do it about three times in your lifetime!

I started building billboards straight out of college, with no knowledge of what I was doing and not much capital to work with. All I had was the desire to make money and an almost equally powerful fear of failure. Starting from scratch, it took me almost a year to find my first location. And even then, nothing came easy since I had absolutely no idea how to rent the ad space or build the thing. But I “endeavored to persevere”, as Teddy Roosevelt would say, and I was able to stick with a pace of building two billboard faces per month for about 15 straight years. At that point, I had 300 billboard faces, which made me the largest privately owned billboard company in Dallas/Ft. Worth. And I did that despite the fierce competition – there were no less than 60 billboard companies operating in Dallas at that time. Every ground lease and every advertising lease was virtually hand-to-hand combat to obtain.

For most billboard owners, your big boss is city hall. Without their permit and approval, you cannot build, or rent, or maintain your billboard. And because of their enormous power, it is essential that you have a good strategy for dealing with them in a manner that can get you what you want.

We won’t even worry about trashing the stock market – it’s already trashed itself. If you are happy losing 40% of your investment as the end result of chasing after 8%, then stick with stocks. If you have higher goals, however, then a small investment in the outdoor advertising “billboard” business may be right for you. The upside is huge, and the downside is negligible. And the opportunities are all around you.

You can’t be in the billboard business and not have a storm-related accident at some point, unless you live in an area where the wind never exceeds about 30 mph. Many a time, in the middle of the night, I have headed out to look at my billboards after a really bad storm has blown through. I’ve done this because I know how important it is to get to the sign quickly after there’s damage to mitigate the situation. Here’s what to do if this should ever happen to you;

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.

We've all had biology in high school, and can probably name some of the parts of a frog. But can you name the parts of a billboard, and what they do? Let's take a quiz and see.

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”.

There is nothing scarier than digging your first monopole foundation. An augur pulls up and starts drilling a hole in the earth about five feet in diameter, and you have no idea what’s down there. Here are some ideas on what you’ll hit, and what it may mean.

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. And if you fail to utilize this information, brought to you by billboard company research beginning in the 1920s, your client’s billboard may be illegible and ineffective.

So you're building a billboard but you're a little worried about some potential tree obstructions. The time to confront this problem is now, before you begin construction.

So you have a billboard that won’t rent. Maybe you need to change you attitude to get it sold. Here’s the deal: everyone would take it for free, right? Sure they would. Thank God you have a commodity that everyone wants.

There is a right way and a wrong way to build a billboard. Unfortunately, the punishment for not building the right way can be crushing – from $10,000 to move the sign to total loss of your investment if property damage leads to expensive litigation. Building a billboard the correct way is essential to prospering in the outdoor billboard business.

Every two-sided billboard has two distinctly different ad faces to rent -- the right-hand read and the left-hand read. The right-hand read is the side of the sign that is seen on the right-hand side of the street, while the left-hand read is the side that is always seen on the other side of the road, beyond the lane carrying traffic the other direction.