Holdout gets $1.7MM from data center giant
Posted by Brant Bernet on Tue, Oct 05, 2010 @ 06:00 PM
I have a friend who owns a great little piece of property in Dallas. He has owned it for years and will likely own it until frosty snowballs are merrily rolling down the hills in hell. You see, he was approached by a big developer many years ago that wanted to buy his little building. They went back and forth on the price but they never could agree.
The deal died and a few years later the developer built high rise condominiums right up to his property line on three sides. Sometimes holding out doesn't pay.
Donnie and Kathy Fullbright have quite a different story today. After paying just $6,000 for an acre of land back in 1975 in Maiden, North Carolina, they held out just long enough to sell to search engine giant, Google for over $1,700,000. The fact that it snuggles up next to Google’s 500,000 square foot shiny new data center didn’t hurt the negotiations.
Way to go Donnie and Kathy…the $1.7MM will be less than a rounding error on Google’s $1 Billion dollar spend, but that’s about $40 per square foot and isn’t bad for farmland in rural North Carolina.
Image from the children's book The Little House by Virginia Lee Burton; 1942