News Opinion Article from the Final Arrangements News Journal

Funeral Homes have been sold a bill of goods when it comes to what the Internet can and will do for them.

Cemetery Lots and Grave Sites for Sale - Buyers Everywhere! 
Cemeteries Selling Nowhere!

Press Release April 6, 2005
 ©The Final Arrangements News Journal

What do you do when you have more buyers for cemetery property than you have cemetery property to sell them? Exactly what the folks at The Final Arrangements Network through their Cemetery Registry are doing once again. Try to get the very Cemeteries where buyers want to buy to start making them offers.

“It sounds simple, a no brainer, but we tried this before and had less than stellar success with the concept.” Offered Lori Campbell, Corporate Communications Director for The Final Arrangements Network. “Before I got to FAN, the company had made offers to cemeteries across the US to provide contact information and some description of the products, services and types of property they had available for buyers. Hardly anybody even paid attention, let alone took them up on the offer.” Campbell added.

The surprising thing about the offer, Campbell mentioned, made back in 2003 by The Final Arrangements Network was it also offered to show pictures, if the cemetery had them of their facility, and even to link directly to the cemetery’s website and Email, if they had one. FAN went so far, back then, to provide a web page within its site for cemeteries who wanted to have an Internet site but couldn’t justify the cost or didn’t have to expertise to manage it.

“The cost was nadda, zero, zip to the cemeteries, but no one seemed interested. It had to be amazing to FAN, considering they were making the offer absolutely free with no strings attached.” Said Campbell.

Though those days are long gone. The Final Arrangements Network, having gained a solid foothold in the private cemetery property sales industry has moved beyond those struggling days where a seller could register for $9.95.

There are now two types of registration Standard and Absolutely Private and costs are $79.95 and $89.95 respectively. A team of specialists now performs buyer and seller matching searches throughout North America for buyers and sellers alike. Properties can now be bought by Funeral Directors and families for “Immediate Use” as The Cemetery Registry has pushed its vast seller client list to prepare their properties for this kind of sale, which accounts for 80% of all cemetery properties sales each year.

“Despite our tremendous growth and the dramatic increase in property sales, we still don’t have nearly enough property at thousands of cemeteries across the country. We have hundreds if not thousands of buyers who have been waiting months to even get an offer they can look at because there are just too many buyers coming out of the woodwork faster than we can find sellers who have the right property to offer them.” Campbell offered.

The Final Arrangements Network has decided to make another run at finding marketing minded cemeteries that want to at least make an offer to its buyers. The initiative will be made via the press and by Email to cemeteries where FAN has not been able to secure a private owner who has property to sell to one of its buyer clients. The service will carry a yearly price tag to cover FAN’s Buyer’s Search Team cost to execute the thousands of contacts and correspondences that will have to be made to these buyers to make the cemetery offers known.

“We aren’t going to do this for free because it is a really big project and by the time you add up just the number of buyers we have to contact, in California for example, it is going to take a lot of man hours to do just the research, let alone the back and forth communication between buyers and sellers we get with just about every negotiation. Besides it seems if you offer something for free nobody thinks it has any value, even if it does. We learned that one fast.” Said Campbell.

The Final Arrangements Network has put an investment fee of $120 a year for a cemetery to participate. In order the make the investment really justifiable for many of the smaller cemeteries, FAN will offer direct Email and website linking for cemeteries who have made those types of Internet investments for their facility.

In addition, each Cemetery would have listing in the Registry in their State and City of service, like any other seller of cemetery property who has registered. They will also be able to constantly update their listing and have unlimited editing privileges, which means a cemetery will be able to feature specials they may have from time to time or feature services and products they can offer a buyer, such as markers, caskets, vaults, urns, etc.

“To me it is a pretty straightforward decision. FAN has a lot of buyers who want to buy cemetery property and cemeteries have a lot of property they want to sell. The Cemetery Registry is the perfect meeting spot for both sides to get together and negotiate a deal.” Offered Campbell. She went on to say, “We hope this time we get a bit better response because we really do need these cemeteries to participate. The number of buyers has just been accelerating at a much greater pace than we are going to be able to handle and provide property to otherwise.”

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For More Information:
Email: Final Arrangements Mail @

Websites:
http://www.finalarrangementsnetwork.com/
http://thecemeteryregistry.com/

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