We have Grey Outdoor scheduled for our Company of the Day and in talking with Grey Vick he shared this terrific story about a site he developed. So we moved it up to the lead and wanted to share his story with you all.  Our normal information on the business follows.

Grey, what was your 13 year billboard project?

The project was originally for 6 billboards on leased property about 30 miles from my house.  They were in the woods on multiple properties with no access.  You couldn’t even walk to where the signs were to be located!  One of the properties we had leased turned out to be an incorrect owner on the tax records, after we did title work.  When the new owner was notified of ownership it was a nice surprise to have an offer in hand to sell it.

Why did the project take so long?

We started with leases in 2008 and couldn’t get the permits. We had so many approvals on this project for county, city and state at every level, which made it really difficult with lots of meetings for amendments and annexations. We had to increase the size of the town limits, and annex a church on the border of the town, to get be able to get approval for the sites.  This required us to run a sewer line and tap into the town sewer system.

Clearing the land, which turned out to be us selling the timber on the property, that was really wet.  We had to construct a 1.5 mile long road through low land.  I think the total time to permit everything was close to an 8 year process.

To get power we had to run power lines across the interstate and obtain easements from the state and the neighboring landowner across the highway to get power.

How are the billboards doing?

We ended up buying all the land comprising three different parcels totaling 60 acres and, in addition, had to buy 4 separate easements to access the land. We erected 8 billboards each 640 square feet, back to back.  We have done well renting all of the faces.

What did you learn along the way?

There are so many lessons, too many to go through in this article.

One lesson is about timber land and certain exemptions this type of property has when dealing with federal and state issues.  Learning about these exemptions saved us over $120,000 from buying credits to build a road down the property (thanks Google).  We are in the process of replanting timber now on the remaining land.

The next lesson is, Never quit! There were several times I had almost given up on the project and right after these moments we always had a big breakthrough in the deal. The project has proven to give us a great return on investment and a big presence in our area.  I am very grateful for the experience I gained from this project and has made us much more savvy investors and landowners.

Company: Grey Outdoor

Headquarters: P.O. Box 1591, Wrightsville Beach, North Carolina

Markets: North Carolina, South Carolina

Email: grey@greyoutdoor.com

Phone: 910-620-5168

Some additional information from Grey Vick on Grey Outdoor:

We have around 325 structures and 670 faces with 30 digitals. We have mostly Watchfire digitals and 6 Formetco. Both have been great to work with. Our oldest digital is 5 years old.

Our team has grown a lot in the past couple of years. There are 6 of us now along with independent contractors in operations.

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