Randy Burkett has 42 years experience in the out of home advertising business in addition to serving a term as a City Councilman in Amarillo, Texas. Today he shares his thoughts on site development.
The toughest sign I’ve ever developed.
The toughest one to build was in Albuquerque. It was in Historic Old Town. Central and Rio Grande. There were two houses 4-5′ apart. We had one place to put the billboard. Couldn’t get equipment in there so I had two guys take turns and they hand dug a hole 16’ deep by 4 feet wide. We coned off Rio Grande Boulevard to park a crane and they just lifted the column over one house into the hole. And we couldn’t get the concrete truck back there either. The guys hauled concrete in wheelbarrows. Once done, we lifted the head over the same house. The install took about a week.
What makes a good out of home site.
It’s hard to find any site today. You can build a bunch of B & C locations but I’m not interested in that. To build a quality unit it’s not just a matter of going down to get a permit anymore. Most Cities are closed, so you work your way through the variance or special use process. Landlords have gotten smarter or greedier as well. We try to look at stuff in the good area of town because that’s where everybody wants to be with their ad dollars. We try to get around hospitals, car dealers and malls, theaters…we know everybody is going to go past that sign to get to where they are going.
Developing signs in Puerto Rico
It was really a nightmare. My brother and I made three trips over there. We secured several locations and the permitting process is almost impossible. We were there in the middle of the summer. We got our leases and were trying to permit them and what happened was the state permitting office just closed. I guess they ran out of budget. We were getting the run around. We couldn’t get to the right guy for approvals. We sold our leases. While we were down there as well we got another company with about 40 faces under an LOI. It was just a mess. He had 3 really premier units but all the leases were all in Spanish. A lot of it were handshake deals. A lot were expired. It was going to take so much cleaning up that we just said we’re out of here. The last time I went down there it was a picket fence of digitals. Digital billboards every 300-400 feet. It was just crazy. One local outfit called bMedia – they did a great job. They stayed after it. They ended up buying Lamar’s stuff. I have no regrets not building Puerto Rico. Just too much risk.
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