Sunday, September 11, 2011

Buying graves at a discount

There are over 1 million interment spaces owned nationwide by people who are not going to use them.  They may have inherited them.  They may not live near to where the graves are located.  For whatever reason the owners are not going to use them.  These graves can legally be bought.  It is perfectly fine and perhaps a good thing to do for the buyer.  The seller wants to sell them for as high a price as possible and the buyer wants to pay as low a price as possible.  The graves market is very illiquid.  There is no central exchange like there is for stocks with the New York Stock Exchange or NASDAQ, etc.  The price that seems to work is about 20% of what the local cemetery currently charges for graves they sell.  So you can buy interment spaces (in ground graves, above ground crypts, cremation interment options, etc.) at a deep deep discount to what you would pay the local cemetery when buying directly from it.  In urban areas where graves sell from $2500 to $7000 per grave and up, and 80% discount purchase price adds up to a lot of money.  The buyer is happy.  The seller gets to be done with something that is sitting uselessly around, and the cemetery gets to sell the buyer other things that would not be sold if the graves sat empty forever.

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