After running across an interesting thread on Ask MetaFilter regarding tips about selling or marketing cemetery plots, I thought some of the advice might be of value to the readers of Cemetery-Plot.com.
The forum post comes from Lauralee Smith who asks:
Trying to sell four adjacent cemetery plots. Funeral home suggested Craigslist ads, which I am currently running with pictures and *very* competitive pricing. No nibbles. Unconvinced that people in the market for such things actually read Craigslist. Need brilliant ideas on how and where to reach potential customers for cemetery plots in greater Seattle area. (Skywriting is out.)
Fellow forum users share some good tips in some of the reply threads that follow her question. Here are a just a few:
- List in Local Want-ads: “My guess it that people looking for cemetery plots in this day and age probably aren’t scouring the internet, but rather, would look in the same place they’d look to find local garage sales. Where i grew up, that was the PennySaver – a nearly free weekly paper full of classifieds and a smattering of local news. Looks like in Seattle it’s the Little Nickel?”
- Donate it for the tax deduction: “If you can’t find a buyer you might consider donating them to a local hospice. You would get a nice tax deduction (if the hospice is a non profit) and the hospice patient with no means to buy a plot would have one less thing to worry about.”
- Go local: “Other funeral homes? Church bulletins? If it is a city or town owned cemetery you could try the town offices. Most certainly the target group reads the local Irish Sports page (The obits page), a small classified placed on that page should do it.”
- Be aware of the local cremation rate: “…As for selling them, the odds are not in your favor. There’s next to no aftermarket for graves in the US, especially for areas with a high cremation rate, and Seattle’s cremation rate is well over 50%.”
- Use an online listing service: “… We are considering using the site [another forum member] linked to, GraveSolutions. (a name which I find quite funny).”