How Owning Your Building Unlocks Passive Income Opportunities For Businesses

To buy or to rent? That is the question for businesses around the country when they look for a place to call their base of operations. Whether it’s a retail unit or office space, companies always ponder if it’s worth buying the place instead of just renting it. The advantage of renting is a simple one: you reduce your upfront overheads substantially, and will likely see more options on the market. 

Regardless, buying a building comes with some benefits of its own, the most notable one being this: it paves the way for countless passive income opportunities. When a business owns the building it works in, it can seek different means of making money from the building itself. Moreover, the opportunities you’ll read about below are all good for the long term, meaning they support sustainable business growth by giving your company a constant trickle of money aside from your primary income source. 

Cell Tower Leasing Projects

Owning your building means you can look for cell tower lease opportunities, which can bring in thousands of dollars in passive income every month. These leases involve cell companies paying for a portion of your building/land to place a tower on. They’re highly popular with multi-storey office buildings, as cell towers need to be quite high up. 

Effectively, they pay you to rent the roof space, and then they install a cell tower on the top. You don’t even notice it’s there when you’re inside working, yet your business certainly notices the regular income coming into its account. It’s believed that some urban rooftop leases can pull in up to $6,000 a month. 

Solar Energy Leasing Projects

Similarly, you can follow an alternative path that leases space for solar companies on your roof. This will normally involve energy companies that are committed to generating as much solar energy as possible to offset their carbon emissions. They need to set up solar networks around busy cities or towns, and they’ll pay you to let them install panels on your roof. 

It’s a big opportunity for businesses, especially because solar companies tend to prefer striking these deals with commercial property owners. You’ve got more roof space than a residential home, so they see it as a good way to maximize their projects. Reports indicate that property owners can earn between $5000 and $50,000 per year through this type of leasing deal.

Office or Desk Leasing

When your business buys a building to operate out of, it might not use every single room. A small business that purchases a three-storey office building may only require one floor. Your team isn’t big enough to use the remaining two – but you can rent the extra space to other companies or professionals. 

In essence, you become the landlord that other businesses pay for the privilege of working in your building. This is a smart idea if you’re in a popular commercial location, as companies will pay premium prices to snag your office space. 

Even if you use 90% of your building, the remaining 10% can be rented out as a desk or coworking space for modern professionals. You could have one free room for people to work in every day – all they have to do is sign up and pay to rent a desk. Or, it could be a meeting room that companies come and use as they please. 

The opportunities are endless when you explore this particular avenue, and it can be a massive source of passive income for your business. It won’t matter if you’re going through a dry month; you’re still earning rent from unused parts of your property. 

OOH Advertising Space

As the building owner, your business can decide what it wants to do with some of the external features. The two ideas mentioned earlier involve using your roof space for certain installations – though perhaps you’d prefer to install a billboard or digital advertising screen there? 

Both offer out-of-home advertising possibilities for other businesses in the area. They will pay you to display their adverts on your billboard or digital screens. The latter is likely a smarter choice because you can join advertising networks that find adverts for your digital screen, ensuring it’s always occupied and you constantly get money. 

Businesses will always look to advertise, and you could offer some prime real estate in a busy area of the city with loads of foot traffic. 

Public Parking Spaces

If you’ve purchased a building that comes with a parking lot – or space for a parking lot – then you may be allowed to monetize this as well. It depends on the legal permits regarding the parking lot, so check with your legal team to ensure that you are able to open it to the public. 

Reserve enough parking spaces for your team, then allow members of the public to park their cars in your lot. Of course, you will charge them for this service (daily rates typically average between $11 and $40), meaning you make a little bit of money on the side. It’s worth trying, especially if you won’t use most of the parking spaces and you’re in a location with hardly any public parking available. 

Your parking lot becomes a hotly coveted place that’ll be full every day. Let’s say you’ve got 100 free parking spaces and people pay an average of $20 to park there daily. That’s $2000 a day – or around $60,000 a month! Public parking lots are an underrated way for businesses to make more money on the side – just be sure you can legally go ahead with this idea. 

Theoretically, your business can rely upon almost all of these ideas at the same time to generate income. You could lease your rooftop space to a cell tower company, convert your private parking lot into a paid public parking area, rent out some rooms or floors to other businesses/professionals, and even install a billboard or digital screen somewhere on your property. When you consider how much passive income all of these ideas generate, it makes the prospect of buying seem far more reasonable than renting. The modern business thrives when it can rely on passive income, and more and more companies are beginning to realize this.