Dead market for grave sites

Dead market for grave sites

As family members move away from each other and cremations are more common, cemetery plots bought long ago go unused

By Mary Umberger
Tribune staff reporter
Published June 19, 2007

Think the residential real estate market is tough? Try finding a buyer for your unwanted graves.

Never an easy sell, disposing of extra burial plots has become more difficult. The latest tactic is to offer them online, via at least a half-dozen sites that some marketers tout as a "multiple listing service" for cemetery lots. And, yes, you can even sell them on eBay.

Just don't expect it to happen overnight -- if at all.

"It's near impossible," said Chicagoan Jacqueline Heins Miles, who for three years has been trying to find a buyer for her family's seven plots, inherited from her mother, in Chicago's Oak Woods Cemetery. "I never thought it would take so long."

Miles, like increasing numbers of Americans, is frustrated that changing times seem to have rendered obsolete the dynastic notion of a "family plot."

"That's long gone," said Michael Martin, a cemetery broker in San Juan Capistrano, Calif., who started a Web-based business after a decade of selling plots to consumers and bereaved families in the traditional face-to-face manner.

"I noticed that people would call in, wanting to sell their plots," said Martin. "But cemeteries don't usually want to buy them back. They're in the business of selling, not in the business of buying."

Deciding there was an unserved marketplace in resale, he became an online broker. His site, PlotExchange.com, is one of at least half a dozen such ventures, typically offering to match sellers who live in one part of the country with buyers who live in another.

He and others in the industry say geography plays the leading role in an increasingly common resale scenario: Decades ago Mom and Dad bought half a dozen or more grave sites, envisioning a family plot to accommodate multiple generations.

Now, their Baby Boomer offspring find themselves spread across the country -- perhaps divorced, remarried, with stepchildren. And they might harbor other notions of a final resting place, or forgo burial in favor of cremation, which the industry says has become increasingly popular.

The Cremation Association of North America projects that by 2010, 36 percent of all deaths will result in cremation, up from 27 percent in 2001.

Robert Fells, external chief operating officer for the International Cemetery and Funeral Association, a trade group in Sterling, Va., said the notion of buying multiple plots took off in the 1920s, when cemeteries promoted the idea that land would become scarce and expensive as the population grew. His industry doesn't keep data but Fells said there never has been a grave-site shortage.

What to do with surplus plots is a problem, he said.

"I get calls every day from consumers who have unwanted cemetery property to sell," said Fells.

He tells them cemeteries occasionally do buy back the plots, but historically there have been three options: Advertise in newspapers or notify local churches that the graves are available, give or sell them to family members, or donate them to a recognized charity that would give them to needy recipients.

"What's new is the Internet," Fells said.

Such brokerages are unregulated in most states. Neither the Illinois Comptrollers Office, which regulates cemeteries, nor the real estate brokerage regulators cover these operations. The Web sites have a variety of business models: charging a monthly advertising fee, taking a percentage of the advertised or sales price, or some combination, Fells said.

Martin, who charges $5.95 a month to advertise, said he tells resellers to contact the cemeteries to determine current pricing for comparable plots, which can range from hundreds to many thousands of dollars, and offer them at 30 percent to 40 percent off. Be prepared to negotiate, he said, and to wait one to six months for a buyer.

Debra Bogrand has hit the six-month point online, and she's giving up.

"I'm paying $5.95 a month, and I'm thinking this is not getting me anywhere," said Bogrand, of University Place, Wash. She is trying to sell two lots at Chicago's Rosehill Cemetery for her mother, who lives in Springfield and doesn't want them. "I listed them online in January and all I have gotten is scam e-mails," she said.

Would-be buyers have responded with transparent ruses that attempt to con her into sending money back to overseas addresses, Bogrand said.

She is seeking "reasonable offers" for the plots her stepfather purchased for $100 each in the 1950s and that now retail for $5,195 each. She is considering contacting a North Side church to look for buyers in its congregation.

Donald Flack of Des Plaines also has heard only from scammers in the three years he has advertised two mausoleum crypts at Memorial Park Cemetery in Skokie via GraveSolutions.com, another online broker. And he got no results after a friend who owns a mortuary posted a notice there of his desire to sell the spaces, which he and his wife, Linda, have owned since the early 1990s. "I think crypts have gone out of style," said Flack, who wants $10,500 each for wall crypts that now sell for $12,000. "Why be in the ground, where it's cold, when you can be up high and dry?"

Online auction sites such as eBay typically list dozens of listings of plots for sale.

One happy purchaser was Carol Mylam, who lives in Riverside, Calif. She said she and her husband, Terry, made a number of inquiries to make sure the seller was genuine and had the right to transfer ownership of the plots. They transacted the sale in the cemetery offices, she said.

"Everything she said online matched what needed to happen," she said. "It turned out to be an OK transaction for us. Whoever would have thought we'd be buying something like this on eBay?"

"We're going to have a view of downtown Los Angeles," she said of the grave sites' location. "We feel like we got a bargain."

But a casual survey of eBay showed that most auctions ended without bids.

Theresa, an eBay seller who did not want her full name published, said in an e-mail that she had been trying to sell four plots in California for four years and finally auctioned them after she reduced her asking price and offered to pay the cemetery's $150-per-plot title transfer fee.

They sold for about $9,000 less than current retail price, she wrote. "Luckily, they were initially bought in the '50s by relatives, and the original cost was next to nothing."

She said she suspects that consumers shy away because they fear being ripped off.

Miles attributes the reticence to procrastination, instead.

"It seems that people aren't really interested until a situation occurs," she said. "People used to try to plan ahead, but this generation is a little different."