My old company has essentially proven a point I have made at least twice in this blog: that many newspapers’ value now is mostly the value of the real estate they own.
A Ken Doctor report today does the math: Less than a month after buying the Orange County Register and Riverside Press Press-Enterprise for $51.2 million, Digital First Media, where I worked from 2011 to 2014, sold 14.3 acres of land surrounding the Register’s Santa Ana office for $34 million, two-thirds of the sale price. The developer who bought the land had purchased the Register’s building two years ago.
In posts about the Boston Globe purchase in 2013 and the Omaha World-Herald sale in 2011, I previously speculated that real estate value probably accounted for most, if not all, of the purchase prices.
I am too busy, and don’t know enough about finance and real estate, to undertake an analysis of recent newspaper sales and what the core value is after you subtract the value of real estate. But I agree with Doctor that this value is “astoundingly low.” And it’s nowhere near the first time that’s happened.
True too, I understand, of places like Sears & Kmart……the land upon which their stores sit is worth far more than the store itself as a functioning entity.
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That’s incredibly sad.
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How far have valuations fallen? Four years ago, Aaron Kushner unloaded Colorado Springs from his newly acquired Freedom holdings for $21 million — a deal that did not include the real estate. That’s about $5m more than Freedom got this month at auction for both the OCRegister and the Riverside Press-Enterprise after backing out the portion of the auction bid that covered the real estate. “Astounding” is right.
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Excellent (but depressing) example, Jeff.
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