So You Want To Be A Landlord? The AMC Theater Is For Sale

So you want to get rich? Well, the best way to get rich, my friend, is to be rich already. But owning property has always been considered a good way to become wealthy, short of inventing an iPhone.

There's a nice piece of property available downtown. Here's the listing. Whether it's prime real estate, you'll have to decide for yourself.

The listing makes it sound pretty enticing.

Operating AMC Portage Street 10 movie theater for sale or lease in downtown Kalamazoo, Michigan. The building is 77,046 SF (per the City of Kalamazoo) with 2 floors on 1.838 acres (per the City of Kalamazoo)....Homer Stryker M.D. School of Medicine is located directly across the street. Many restaurants, cultural experiences and shops are in walking distance including the historic outdoor Kalamazoo Mall which is 2 blocks from the property....The property is connected to Kalamazoo Mall Ramp parking structure and Epic Center Ramp. - Mid-America Group

The WWMT story about this quotes an AMC spokesperson saying this doesn't affect current operations. But you have to wonder about any business like this. What if there's a second wave of coronavirus, and everything gets shut down again. Some movie chains are already going belly up. A lot of restaurants have closed, too. How many have the deep pockets to withstand limited capacity operations, let alone another shutdown?

Pretty much anybody who's in real estate will tell you, to some degree you need to have guts and vision. In the long haul, this might be a great buy. You could probably pick this property up for a song, and eventually (post-pandemic) life will return to some semblance of normal. Will people still want to go to movie theaters? Well, not everybody can buy or fit in a 70 inch 4K TV set in their living room. But, the history of the building is Alamo Theaters, one of the best movie chains in the country, couldn't make a go of it here, so you'd have to have some sort of vision to buy this building.