Billboard Investing, Billboard Values

Outdoor Advertising Company Valuations January 2015

The rule of thumb is that an outdoor advertising company is worth 4-6 times gross revenue.  

My company has been involved in 18 sales of small, mostly rural billboard companies.  The sales multiples varied from 3.2 times revenues to 13 times revenues.  The median sales price was 4.9 times revenue.

I saw 10 billboard transactions with revenues listed on Signvalue yesterday.  The listing price varied from 3.3 times revenue to 18.3 times revenue with a median of 5.1 times revenues.

The sales metric for outdoor is trailing 12 months actual historic revenue.  Every seller I know wants a multiple of 12 months projected revenue as if all the boards were occupied.  Every buyer I know pays a multiple only on actual revenue.  

What sort of billboard sell at the high end of the range:  billboards with easements, billboards with land and billboards with digital sign conversion potential.

What sort of billboards sell at the low end of the range: billboards with bad leases (e.g. lease costs in excess of 20% of gross revenue), billboards with a weighted average remaining lease life of under 10 years, small billboards (less than 14 by 48).

Comments are closed.