Many cities require you to takedown a certain number of square feet of billboard advertising in order to construct a new static billboard or in order to be able to convert a static billboard into a digital billboard.  Today out of home development expert Andy Goodman talks about takedown ratios.

Takedown ratios

I’ve seen them as low as 1:1 and as high as 7:1. The distinction that needs to be made, is it sign for sign or a square footage exchange?  If you take down 1 junior poster/eight sheet or poster panel do you get to replace it with a full sized bulletin?  Or are you talking square footage?  Square footage is the trend.  Square footage works well if the billboard company has junior posters/eight sheets or poster panels in a city that were built in non-zoned areas or commercial areas that have now been transformed into residential or mixed use.  You’ve got a lot of junior posters/eight sheets and poster panels in those areas that potentially could be taken down for a digital bulletin on the freeway.  We’ve seen this happen in some cities around California.

What’s a good takedown ratio

Some cities have gone as high as 7:1 or even higher is square footage and that is an outrageous number.  The Outdoor industry would like to see 2:1 or 3:1 square footage exchange.  The state of California is different than the square footage and it makes a difference if the sign is back to back or “V” structure. Cal Trans on a landscaped freeway on a “taking” or eminent domain will do a 1:1 exchange on static billboard faces, as long as there is no net increase in the number of billboards in the landscaped areas. I believe the state has been allowing a 2:1 exchange for digital billboards with the same requirements in landscaped area.  Those are fair numbers.

The drawback of a high takedown ratio

There are two drawback to high takedown ratios, you limit the number of billboard companies that can participate in a program and when the ratios are too high the Billboard companies won’t participate.  In southern California we have both scenarios,  cities that did 7:1 or higher. Although there were billboard companies that could participate some of them thought the ratios to high and didn’t exchange, there were also many other billboard companies in those cities who didn’t have enough inventory to take enough down…When a city writes a sign code revision it should be written in a way that allows all the out of home companies in the market to participate.

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