IMO population is way too simplistic of an approach and in many ways can be misleading.
First off there is the population within the city limits, the MSA population (Metropolitan Statistical Area) or Combined Statistical Areas (CSA) as well as Micropolitan Statistical Areas to consider and the Primary Census Statistical Areas to consider.
In other words, context is a key. The geographic area in relation to other cities.
The per capita income of the particular city. Which goes along with the type of commerce and companies based in that city.
Most importantly, combining all the above data with the population trends, real estate development trends, and search numbers before deciding the viability of a geo city, whether you plan to hold long term, as an investment, flip, or for development purposes.
Examples of this.
One recent purchase I made was littleton.tv outside of Denver (you may remember from the Columbine shootings)
Now if you go by population alone Littleton has 40,396 which according to many is too small of a city to buy.
But if you dig a little deeper, you find that...
Is a very high socioeconomic city right outside Denver that is growing.
It's search numbers on OVT are as follows:
Count Search Term
18645 littleton
10992 littleton co real estate
2268 littleton coin
2121 littleton coin company
1373 littleton ma real estate
1347 littleton colorado
1200 littleton real estate
Which happens to be higher OVT numbers than many cities with populations of 100K to 150K
Another example of a city I recently picked up is bentonville.tv
In 2000 the pop was 19.730 In 2006 it is 29,538 The headquarters of Wal-Mart Stores, the largest retailer in the world, as well as that of The Whistler Group, a major US manufacturer of radar detectors, are located in Bentonville. So you know major money is pouring into the development of the city and there is an educated high income group of people that live there.
Another big factor if you go small is clustering smaller cities in a certain area with bigger cities to feed traffic off of one another. I've been doing this in concentrated areas across the county.
In Texas For example, I currently own the following cities:
Texas
abilene.tv city pop 115,930 - MSA 158,063
euless.tv pop 51,226 Part of Dallas/Fort Worth International Airport, which serves the cities of Dallas and Fort Worth, is inside the city limits of Euless.
carrollton.tv pop 122,699 in Dallas County, partially in Denton County, and partially in Collin County Also, in 2006, Carrollton was selected as the 19th best place to live in the United States by Money magazine.
cedarhill.tv pop 40,000 located sixteen miles from downtown Dallas
coppell.tv pop 35,958 city in Dallas County, Texas, a suburb and bedroom community of the DFW Metroplex
corpuschristi.tv pop 281,196 MSA 446,565
desoto.tv pop 45,514 in Dallas County
denison.tv pop 22,7723
frisco.tv pop 100,00+ one of the fastest growing us cities As of the 2000 census, the city population was 33,714, while 2006 estimates place the population over 100,000. It is a northern suburb of Dallas
garland.tv pop 216,346 in Dallas County
grandprairie.tv pop 145,600 in Dallas County
kerrville.tv pop 20,500 +
killeen.tv pop 100,233 home of fort hood
laredo.tv pop 213,615
leaguecity.tv pop 61,490
portarthur.tv pop 60,000 + within the Beaumont-Port Arthur metropolitan area
sanangelo.tv pop 88,439 msa 105,752
universitypark.tv pop 23,324 in Dallas county Home to SMU
waxahachie.tv pop 21,000 + in Ellis County
wichitafalls.tv pop 107,635
This gives me leverage to package the smaller cities and the bigger cities together for any aggregator that I want to make a deal with. In other words, these little cities combined with bigger cities make way more sense for development purposes that looking at one small city by itself when you see how they fit together in the bigger picture.
My main point is that IMO the days of having to live in or near a city to make money off of a city are gone. There are a few companies that are very aggressively consolidating geo cities in the .tv arena in an effort to monazite traffic similar to the way that associated cities does in the .com arena. This isn't a matter of if it will happen, but when.
I've had talks with interested parties and when taken into account they ARE interested in deals for these smaller cities as well.
So to answer the obvious question. My future plans are all of the above. I will hold the ownership to the cities, license them out, collect a monthly check and from time to time flip them and get a premium price for them based on the revenue they are already bringing in.
Not only will you be able to make money from owning them, but you'll make money while owning them and licensing them out. In other words the best of both worlds. Just ask all the companies that operated drive in movie theaters where ultimately the huge money came from. The answer, from owning the land my friends.
more on my plans and the cities I've acquired later...
