In this short conversation, Tommy Dobczyk and a co‑speaker discuss why owning the land on which a small business operates—using a car wash and an RV‑park as examples—offers greater control and growth potential compared to leasing. They explain that landlords can raise rent, refuse lease renewals, sell the property, or limit improvements, which can jeopardize a business whose value is tied to its location, traffic flow, utilities, and zoning. While ownership brings added responsibilities such as insurance, maintenance, and operational expenses, it also enables strategic expansions (e.g., adding RV washing services) that would be impossible under a lease. The dialogue emphasizes the need for entrepreneurs to evaluate the trade‑offs between lease flexibility and the long‑term stability and upside that land ownership can provide.
Chapters
So it's better to own the land, or when you have the business, the landlord can raise rent, refuse renewal, sell the property, or restrict improvements. For a car wash, control matters because the value is tied to the location, traffic ingress, egress, drainage, utilities, and zoning. So it's basically saying it's better, but there's, there's more, there's more responsibility, I'm sure, more operating expenses, right? Because now you have to pay for insurance and things like that, right?
Yeah, right. Owning property comes with another level of hassle for sure. But if you're the landlord on the property and the business owner on property, you're not going to put them both in the same business. You'll still do a lease from the business, uh, to the landlord, and the landlord is you. So It's important to know, like, how you can maximize your dollars on all of that every time. Um, if you wanted to, say for example, if you wanted to build a bigger car wash, so you want to wash RV campers instead of, instead of just cars, you would, you would need to own the property to be able to do that. You wouldn't be able to do it with just the car wash. So that's like one of the limitations that you're faced with when dealing with, you know, are you the landlord or just the business owner?
This is very helpful because when I was digging, I was like obsessing over it yesterday and I was like, what's the difference between owning the land and having— so when that question came up, I was like, yes, I need it. I want to know because what's the difference between owning the land and leasing land? Because all the businesses I was looking at yesterday, they all had leases, but I'm like, what if they decide they just want to stop leasing to you and you've, you've spent a couple hundred grand on this investment and now they change the lease up on you?
And she, when she describes how she, you know, how she made it into a $12 million RV park, it's like anybody else would have quit. Like she, she made it sound like she lived on Survivor Island until it was worth $12 million. And so a lot of people are not willing to live inside of a trailer, um, sleep on the floor, divorce their husband, have cranky kids, all of that, just to own a $12 million RV park.
