The Best Unknown Real Estate Investment That NO ONE Is Talking About #kenmcelroy #realestate #realestateinvesting

Business and Beyond
6 followers
Jul 12, 2025
This is a real business. It’s lean. It’s cash flowing. And most importantly—it’s under the radar.
One of the best unknown real estate investments is billboards, and most of you probably don't even
think about these. You're just flying down the road and you see these things subconsciously or
consciously, you never know. But the thing about billboards is this, when you pick up your phone
or your TV or computer, you can pause, fast forward, click on another channel, and you don't
even have to look at ads anymore. It's not with the billboard. You're driving, it's fixed, you pretty
much have to see it. One of the strategies that Ross and I started doing, we started a company
called MC Media, where we started buying what's called fixed billboards, where they're literally
have two sides on the side of a road. And these billboards, they have 25, 30, 40, and even 50-year
leases. Can you imagine that? You actually don't even own the land. And then you might say, well,
you're a real estate guy. What does that even mean? Well, I'm buying the lease. And then there's a
billboard on it, a flat screen in the sky. So I replace them out with a digital, and that's about
250 to 400 grand, depending on what I do. But the reality is, is I'm buying the lease,
I'm buying the location, I'm replacing it with digital. On what they call a static, I have two
sides. On a digital, I have eight ads per side. So I go from two ads to 16 ads. That's called a value
ad. The other thing that I love about this business, once it goes digital, you can actually
just contract with some PR agency or have a graphic artist actually put ads up on a screen
effortlessly and easily. So there's a sales component to this, to keeping the billboards
occupied, of course. And the average occupancy of a billboard, believe it or not, or across the
country is about 70%. So that's not great when you start to look at it as compared to other things,
but it doesn't need to be more than that. So I just did this on a billboard that I bought
in Columbus, Ohio, where the top line revenue is about $20,000 a month. That's right around
$250,000 a year for total gross revenue at 70% occupied. Obviously, if I'm 80%, it'll be a little
higher. If I'm 60%, it'll be a little bit lower. But after costs, which again, aren't that much
because this doesn't require a big staff. It doesn't require a lot of people. The net is about
$180,000 to $190,000 a year. So the billboard and the lease cost a million bucks. And I've got about
$180,000 to $190,000 to be able to distribute against that million dollars each and every year.
But here is one of the biggest reasons that I think billboards are the very best investment
moving forward. And that's because of what we call bonus depreciation. If you guys don't know
what bonus depreciation is, it's okay. Because I didn't know what it was either when I first
got into the business. It essentially just gives you a write-off in the current year you buy
something. And because billboards are considered equipment or land improvements, you can write off
whatever the federal government says you can write off. And currently today, it's 40%. But
under the Trump bill, it's supposed to move to 100%, which it historically has been. So if the
bill gets passed, I'm currently working on a deal right now with six billboards between Las Vegas
and Mesquite, Nevada. And it's currently owned and operating right now. And a lot of these
billboards have long-term contracts with the casinos and they have had for years. And one of
the strategies is to convert these static billboards into digital. And this would be from Las Vegas all
the way up to Mesquite, Nevada along Interstate 15. And if you guys have driven that way, it's on
the way to Salt Lake City. It's a very heavily traveled freeway. So again, we're buying the lease
plus the existing billboards plus the contracts that are already in place. And those, of course,
have a cash flow today. And by converting some of those over to digital, those contract prices will
go up, the revenue will go up. And all that is projected inside of our little business plan.
One of the biggest reasons that we're going to do this is that we're going to put 50%
leverage on these six billboards, which requires about 50% equity, 50% debt, 50% equity. So if
the bonus depreciation goes back up to a hundred percent, now a hundred thousand dollars of
investment could get close to $200,000 in tax savings. Because we potentially could get 100%
write-off from bonus depreciation in the year we buy it, if this new tax bill passes. Even if we
don't, we'll get 40%, which is currently what the number is today. Not only will we get cash flow,
but we'll get a huge tax write-off way above our investment amount in this current tax year.
We're buying the leases, the existing billboards, and we're doing a value add by putting the digital
ones on there. So we're growing our cash flow and we're getting our tax benefits from being
able to buy this. And it sweetens it by using leverage. We could pay all cash, but it's actually
better to use OPM or other people's money and use 50% debt in this case, because now a $100,000
investment could be close to $200,000 in tax savings. So that's the whole goal. And that's
why I'm really bullish on billboards. It doesn't require a lot of people. Once the billboard is in
place and once the lease is in place, there's not a lot to do other than make sure that the weather
and the elements aren't damaging your investment. There's not a lot of people involved except for
keeping these occupied and making sure the customers that advertise on these billboards
are happy. There isn't really a downside to buying these. The reason why they're not on
everybody's radar is just because there's not very many of them. A lot of the counties,
even Clark County in Nevada, have stopped allowing more billboards. So it's a really,
really small niche business and there's not a lot of brokers that specialize in it. It's very
similar to like RV parks or mobile home parks where you don't really see these on a national
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more. From an advertiser standpoint, a lot of people that would agree that there's almost
nothing you can do when you're driving by a billboard to not see it. And you of course have
lots of options here. And with the, with the price of advertising going up, it's because a lot of
the consumers have a lot of choices and a lot's coming at them at once. Whereas when they're
driving a car, they're just looking at the ad on the side of the road. So we believe it's one of
the last things that the advertiser can capture someone's attention as they're actually moving
on by. So if you're an accredited investor and you're interested in taking a look at some of
the billboards that we bought, and of course being on a list of taking a look at what we are buying,
just click on the link below. And if you're interested in seeing six other high cash
unique real estate opportunities, just click on the link below. Just watch this video next.
