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Content website, if you can get in the search engines.
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Laundromat [unattended]. I've followed some forums and there are people out there with 5-7 laundromats.
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Real estate [outsource management]. There are plenty of people who are worth tens of millions and just focus on the higher-end activities (getting financing, finding and analyzing properties, etc.)
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Billboards? - this is just a guess, but I'm thinking once you land a client it is very easy. Plus you could probably outsource sales, as you can with websites.
EDIT
5) Vending machines
2) Laundromats are like car washes. Automated, but need maintenance and babysitting to make sure things are clean, working, stocked, etc. If you can find an existing one and buy it, great. If not, the water tap fees to start a new one can be high.
4) Billboards are the holy grail, imho. I know several owners who sit back and cash in on their leases. However, they are practically impossible to get permits for new ones. Highway Beautification Act of the 1970's led to strict regulations. Existing ones are leased by a handful of companies nationwide. Very few for sale.
just my 2 cents..
Billboards. Most are owned by clear channel. Damn bastards.
Own a car wash...can confirm that they require 2 visits a day due to the fact that the public believes they can trash the place without care. Not a terrible, or full time gig, but still has its fair share of work and headaches.
It has already been stated, but barrier to entry (car wash, laundromat) is the largest factor these days. In my area (SE Michigan), the water and sewer tap fee is at least $60k and that is if you get approval.
I also own a bar & grill and steer clear of those puppies...there is nothing passive about that business.
Whenever someone says car wash I think of Breaking Bad! But yeah, any business that requires constant interaction with consumers is far from passive.
Funny coincidence, the name of my wash is Bubbles Galore.
Have an A1 day!
Could you tell me more about the car wash? Sounds neat.
What do you want to know?
Did you have to finance the sewer tap fee? How did you get started?
I don't understand. Why are laundromats good for making money? Isn't the cost of maintenance high? All those machines, all that water, all of that space?
Laundromats make a killing. Before its first scheduled maintenance a machine should have more than paid for itself.
The hard part of owning a laundromat is finding the under-served location that will let you run one at full capacity.
right, but how does it make that killing? Is the human traffic really THAT heavy?
Edit don't get why i'm getting downvoted. it's a legitimate question.
There are a ton of Laundromats a few miles from my house and they are always empty. I suspect they are the money washing kind. So foot traffic doesn't always have to be a factor.
well lets say each machine only make $0.50 an hour PROFIT on average over 24 hours.
you have 50 machines, 25 washers and 25 dryers.
thats $219,000 a year of profit per laundromat.
even if you use half of that for expansion &/or upgrades and keep the other half you are still making 100k a year.
Sounds like Laundromats are a lot like Vending Machines. The profits can be good and it can be a relatively passive activity. However finding a good location is the real problem.
I would say that parking lots are pretty close to passive.
There was news story in my city where random people would wear reflective vests and stand and collect money near sports stadiums and collect cash for people to park. They didn't own these lots and they didn't work for anyone who owned the lots. This particular person/people had been doing it for about 7 years when they got caught.
Related he he
Pretty sure I paid that guy a few years back. I just park on the street near there now instead...
I parked in a lot near a bar once, You'd go in, it looked free, but then some lady would get out her car, tell you where to park and ask for $20. It seemed like such a scam and she yelled at me for not parking close enough to the other cars because she had to squeeze in as many as she could.
Source please? That's great.
They also happen to be a great way to let a property appreciate in value without committing to building anything particularly capital intensive on top of it while still generating income.
Saw something on HackerNews about that a while back.
ANY business can be ran passively. That's just the nature of business. Ever heard of delegation OP? You can get a CEO to run your company, whilst he gets senior managers to manage managers etc etc
Sure, If your designing business websites by yourself, that's not passive income - but a 100 person firm composing of designers, coders, salespeople and managers? Passive income baby.
You can sip on martini and smoke cigar whilst fucking a prostitute as your company runs and grows by it's self. You and a company are two different entities, a company is a machine that controls and grows it's self and you are the engineer. Unfortunately, most newbies don't see this and they become attracted to thinks like the internet and software instead of searching for the right market.
tl:dr - every business, once it's successful enough, can be ran passively through delegation.
I remember hearing about the CEO of a big company (can't remember who) who had nothing but a fax machine and telephone in his home office. Every morning he would make a few calls to see how things were going, if anything needed to be signed it was faxed through. After those few calls he was done for the day.
I think this point should be taken more seriously by small business / startup owners and entrepreneurs. If you need to be hands on with your company all the time, what happens if you get hit by a bus? If you have a healthy business you should be able to take a month off without anything going wrong, your staff should be able to manage everything for you.
You just rewrote The 4-Hour Workweek in two paragraphs.
I assure you real estate and websites are not passive.
Real estate I know enough to be aware of the effort involved.
Websites I'm very experienced and have several revenue generating sites. It takes a lot of effort to get them started and earning money. Once that is done you can certainly get a team to help you continue with that momentum but it would still require regular oversight.
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6-10% for management isn't bad at all, so not really a major hit on profit. There are few, if any situations I would take on negative cash flow to start, everything I have bought is massively cash flowing from day one (unless it's a major turnaround project or a property that needs a ton of work and is vacant the first few months)
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I go in with zero of my own money, or as close to it as possible, they are leveraged with a loan or an existing loan. I know you cant cashflow well in CA, and I cant in my market either. So I've decided to go where the purchase to rents makes the most sense with stable growth... aka the midwest. Milwaukee, Indianapolis and Columbus is where I'm at.
They aren't 100% passive for sure. But they're the closet thing to it (besides say bonds and dividends from stock).
You can hire a manager for real estate, and if you have an "authority" website built in 1995 that has a lot of backlinks and never has to be updated, you're basically just collecting money.
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You bring up a good point. Maybe not a big "authority" site. But there is a forum where people cold-email owners of old websites and then throw up adsense on them. One of the examples was a simple html site on the solar system, which through off $1000/mo or so. So not the next CNN.com, but if you have several dozen of these sites, you'll do well.
That's quite a bit different and much more strategic.
Kindle books? Niche infoproducts?
These 2 are still virtually untapped.. from personal experience.
can you expand this concept for me?
niche infoproduct is a product that solves a specific problem. You get customers through giving out free information on platforms like youtube, forums or your own blog. You can syndicate infoproducts to infoproduct marketplaces like udemy, clickbank or jvzoo to get other people to sell your product. I wrote a post on how I got started here:
http://www.reddit.com/r/Entrepreneur/comments/24q0ln/how_i_built_a_27000year_passive_income/
Kindle publishing is basically a micro-version of it - using the Amazon Kindle Publishing platform for distribution. I wrote a whole course on how you can get started. Find it here:
http://www.reddit.com/r/Entrepreneur/comments/25f6id/kindle_publishing_business_the_complete_guide_to/
Very saturated market.
this type of thinking is what prevents this platform from actually becoming saturated.
For writing a vampire romance novel it may be, but what about a quality DIY plumbing guide or some other niche nonfiction book?
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let's connect bro.
Kindle ebook sales hardly get back to small writers. Rip off.
What are you even talking about? Even for the cheapest price you can put a book at- $.99- you make at least $.35 per sale.
I write erotica and work maybe 10, 15 hours a week to bring in enough money to support myself and my fiance.
Do you do any marketing?
Ehh, not really. I post on a few Reddits here and there, but any paid advertising has done next to nothing for me.
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I have 200 or so short stories and bundles of short stories out, and am currently working on my first novel.
Shorts should be put out at least once a week, though I don't always follow that rule. Novels should be put out at least once a month.
Shorts are 3k to 10k words. Novels are 40k+.
My Website gets about 300 hits a day. Here it is.
I advertise on Reddit, and used to advertise on Tumblr a bit. I've tried some paid advertising, too, but it was never worth it for me. Aside from that, though, I don't advertise at all because people want to read my stories. They seek them out on Amazon.
Don't write. Hire people to write for you.
Any tips on good websites to do this?
Elance.com
Odesk.com
how much on average do these people on odesk and elance charge for writing books?
all depends on who is writing and how the terms are set up. 35 bucks to 1000 bucks per book. it all depends....
I was gonna suggest the same two things.
It doesn't make sense when you say they're virtually untapped though. How so? It's like saying that selling apps, websites, software, or anything, is untapped.
it means that there are tons of space and most people still have no clue what theyre doing. oh and the market is growing.
Oh okay. They don't mean the same thing =P
yes. they do.
ATMs
Storage units. Outright investment to build is substantial but after that...
This has been beer money for me so far but Etsy. Not physical products that include shipping, inventory etc but digital downloads.
Once you upload the initial listing, it's all passive. Every 4 months, find out which ones don't sell and remove them or tweak them and that's it.
Pain in the ass designing the initial listings, though. I need like 10 times more listings than I have now to pay my rent but I'm slowly getting there..
Ideas: T-shirt & textile printables (digital files for customers to print using transfer paper), digital designs, e-books, tutorials, public domain art, wedding/baby shower invitations (all digital) etc etc
I've been a digital good seller for about 4 years. Again, there is nothing automated about it, especially if you form a company around it. Products need to be updated, added, removed, etc. You cannot just take someone's work and upload it, you need to develop each item and its costly.
Good point. I guess the word 'passive' is a bit of a stretch to be used in this case. It's good to see uploaded files being purchased long after you forget about them but designing, uploading and maintaining the new files plus the whole business side requires a great deal of effort.
Etsy with its instant download process and automated renewals has made me some pocket change without worrying too much about anything but again, it's not a business if you don't put in business hours/effort.
You can sell digital stuff on Etsy? What kind of items?
Yes you can and it's instant download as well so you don't have to manually do anything after they purchase the file. They receive a download link automatically.
I've seen various stuff offered as digital downloads on Etsy (see the "ideas" section in the above post). Most of the things in my store can be considered 'craft supplies' such as letters, monograms, decals etc.
But as I said, it's beer money. Couple of hundred bucks over a few months. I'd have to work it as a day job to reap any serious profits (and by serious I don't mean 'rich' serious, more like 'pay the rent and groceries' serious).
BUT, once they're up, they're up.Once you have thousands of well-earning listings, it can be pretty passive.
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So what do i do in those 60 days?
I edited my original post with plenty of details.
So it seems like you need to know the right people to do that kind of stuff, how would you approach potential investors, what basic real estate knowledge do i need to do this kind of stuff, i read everything and feel like i only understood half of it.
It is a bit complicated, but it doesnt help that I use lingo and didnt use paragraphs. My suggestion would be to take a real estate class. It will cost you some money out of pocket, but will be well worth it. Most people do a few real estate transactions in their lives and the $100-250 investment will be worth it.
What are your margins - say gross return? I wrote a screen scraper to crossreference property prices, against rental prices to determine the gross yield. I further amended the code to get the yields of house price - 5k, HP-10k to see how that affected the yield.
The end result was disappointing - there were a few properties with gross yields of 8-10%, but they were in rougher parts of town, so the long term chance of the house price increasing was low. The same was true of the good areas having low yields to the point renting it out wasnt viable
I stuck with stocks and shares - but i keep checking the numbers once a year
I also built a scraper to do the exact same thing. I had some rental properties that I have sold and I wanted to see if it was worth buying new ones. It seemed to me that landlording was a dead end.
I know plenty of people who do single family housing. I think there is a lot of risk in that game. I dont own 100% of the deals that I do so I make most of my money upfront in fees and make 20-50K per year passively depending on the deal. I edited my original posting with more information if you are interested.
Do you have crazy renters? Heard some weird stories about renters along the way.
Yes I have crazy renters, but 99% of them are great people. I dont manage the properties directly, but hear the occasional story. It is just like everywhere else on the planet, 1% of people are assholes.
Are you a middleman for transactions or a landlord?