What do you do when
you have more buyers for cemetery property than you have cemetery
property to sell them? Exactly what the folks at The Final Arrangements
Network through their Cemetery Registry are doing once again. Try to get
the very Cemeteries where buyers want to buy to start making them
offers.
“It sounds
simple, a no brainer, but we tried this before and had less than stellar
success with the concept.” Offered Lori Campbell, Corporate
Communications Director for The Final Arrangements Network. “Before I
got to FAN, the company had made offers to cemeteries across the US to
provide contact information and some description of the products,
services and types of property they had available for buyers. Hardly
anybody even paid attention, let alone took them up on the offer.”
Campbell added.
The
surprising thing about the offer, Campbell mentioned, made back in 2003
by The Final Arrangements Network was it also offered to show pictures,
if the cemetery had them of their facility, and even to link directly to
the cemetery’s website and Email, if they had one. FAN went so far,
back then, to provide a web page within its site for cemeteries who
wanted to have an Internet site but couldn’t justify the cost or
didn’t have to expertise to manage it.
“The
cost was nadda, zero, zip to the cemeteries, but no one seemed
interested. It had to be amazing to FAN, considering they were making
the offer absolutely free with no strings attached.” Said Campbell.
Though
those days are long gone. The Final Arrangements Network, having gained
a solid foothold in the private cemetery property sales industry has
moved beyond those struggling days where a seller could register for
$9.95.
There
are now two types of registration Standard and Absolutely Private and
costs are $79.95 and $89.95 respectively. A team of specialists now
performs buyer and seller matching searches throughout North America for
buyers and sellers alike. Properties can now be bought by Funeral
Directors and families for “Immediate Use” as The Cemetery Registry
has pushed its vast seller client list to prepare their properties for
this kind of sale, which accounts for 80% of all cemetery properties
sales each year.
“Despite our tremendous growth and the dramatic
increase in property sales, we still don’t have nearly enough property
at thousands of cemeteries across the country. We have hundreds if not
thousands of buyers who have been waiting months to even get an offer
they can look at because there are just too many buyers
coming out of the woodwork faster than we can find sellers who have the
right property to offer them.” Campbell offered.
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The
Final Arrangements Network has decided to make another run at finding
marketing minded cemeteries that want to at least make an offer to its
buyers. The initiative will be made via the press and by Email to
cemeteries where FAN has not been able to secure a private owner who has
property to sell to one of its buyer clients. The service will carry a
yearly price tag to cover FAN’s Buyer’s Search Team cost to execute
the thousands of contacts and correspondences that will have to be made to
these buyers to make the cemetery offers known.
“We
aren’t going to do this for free because it is a really big project and
by the time you add up just the number of buyers we have to contact, in
California for example, it is going to take a lot of man hours to do just
the research, let alone the back and forth communication between buyers
and sellers we get with just about every negotiation. Besides it seems if
you offer something for free nobody thinks it has any value, even if it
does. We learned that one fast.” Said Campbell.
The
Final Arrangements Network has put an investment fee of $120 a year for a
cemetery to participate. In order the make the investment really
justifiable for many of the smaller cemeteries, FAN will offer direct
Email and website linking for cemeteries who have made those types of
Internet investments for their facility.
In
addition, each Cemetery would have listing in the Registry in their State
and City of service, like any other seller of cemetery property who has
registered. They will also be able to constantly update their listing and
have unlimited editing privileges, which means a cemetery will be able to
feature specials they may have from time to time or feature services and
products they can offer a buyer, such as markers, caskets, vaults, urns,
etc.
“To
me it is a pretty straightforward decision. FAN has a lot of buyers who
want to buy cemetery property and cemeteries have a lot of property they
want to sell. The Cemetery Registry is the perfect meeting spot for both
sides to get together and negotiate a deal.” Offered Campbell. She went
on to say, “We hope this time we get a bit better response because we
really do need these cemeteries to participate. The number of buyers has
just been accelerating at a much greater pace than we are going to be able
to handle and provide property to otherwise.”
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