What a world's fair teaches investors: buy the dirt, not the building
A friend asked me whether Louisville really had a world's fair. It did, and the paperwork has a good lesson in it for anyone who buys land.
It was called the Southern Exposition. It opened August 1, 1883, and ran every summer and fall through 1887. The city's Board of Trade sold stock at $25 a share and raised about $221,000 in roughly five weeks, short of the $300,000 goal. They built it anyway. Money in hand January 1, doors open August 1.
The grounds covered about 45 acres between Fourth and Sixth streets. The main building was two stories of wood and glass, about 600 by 900 feet, roughly 13 acres under one roof, and it may have been the largest wooden building ever built in the United States. When the sun went down, 4,600 of Edison's new light bulbs came on inside it. In the first 88 days, 770,048 people came through the gates. Louisville had about 124,000 people in 1880. That's more than six times the whole city in one summer.
Then it disappeared. The last season ended in 1887, and by 1889 the building was gone. Part of the lumber went one block away into a theater. Nobody hid anything. The land was now worth more than the shed sitting on it.
In 1890 a group called the Victoria Land Company bought the whole tract for $300,000, which is roughly $11 million in today's dollars. They laid it out like the squares of London: St. James Court and Belgravia Court, a green down the middle, a fountain. The lots sold and the houses went up between 1892 and 1905. A stone castle built on the old grounds between 1893 and 1895 is still standing and open for tours. And the St. James Court Art Show just ran its 70th year on the same ground.
The building was the billboard. The dirt was the asset.
The fair brought the crowds, the streetcar traffic, the electric light and the attention to what had been open land on the southern edge of town. Louisville's first electric streetcar line started running in 1889. Once all that was in place, a 13-acre wooden shed was the worst possible use of that land.
Here's how I'd apply it:
Don't fall in love with the building. Follow where the people, the transportation, and the money are going.
A temporary anchor can create permanent value. A fair, a stadium, a hospital expansion, a plant opening. People decide they like the place, and the land under it ends up worth more than whatever is standing on it.
Buy before the lots hit the market. The people who bought on St. James Court in 1890 weren't buying a fair. They were buying where the crowd was headed.
What temporary anchor in your market is bringing people to land that's still priced for its old use? I'm curious what you're watching.
