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Salem sells WKAT at a huge loss, 1360 to go Hatian and add 102.3 FM

AMRocks

AMRocks

Star Participant
From Tom Taylor's newsletter:
Salem sells Miami’s WKAT/1360 for $3.5 million - the same station for which it paid $10 million a dozen years ago. Salem’s currently programming a Spanish Christian “Radio Luz” format on WKAT North Miami and its translator. That will change as local broadcaster Nelson Voltaire brings Haitian programming to the signals under an LMA. (He’s known as “Piman Bouk” – and he’s been an activist in the local Haitian community.) WKAT currently runs 5,000 watts daytime/1,000 watts at night, and holds a 2014 construction permit to upgrade to 9,300 watts days/400 watts at night. The translator may be more likely to be upgraded. It’s currently at 101.3 and licensed to Sebring with 10 watts. But Salem’s got a CP modification to move it to Miami at 102.3, this time at 250 watts. Salem retains the “WKAT” call letters, and 1360 will change calls to WHIM – currently used on another Salem property in South Florida, the Christian teaching 1080 licensed to Coral Gables. Broker is Doyle Hadden, whose 5% fee of $175,000 will be paid jointly by Salem ($35,000) and the buyer ($140,000).

So why do you think Salem wants to keep the WKAT call letters? Considering they tend to program religious stations, WHIM might have been more appropriate.
 
AMRocks said:
From Tom Taylor's newsletter:
Salem sells Miami’s WKAT/1360 for $3.5 million - the same station for which it paid $10 million a dozen years ago. Salem’s currently programming a Spanish Christian “Radio Luz” format on WKAT North Miami and its translator. That will change as local broadcaster Nelson Voltaire brings Haitian programming to the signals under an LMA. (He’s known as “Piman Bouk” – and he’s been an activist in the local Haitian community.) WKAT currently runs 5,000 watts daytime/1,000 watts at night, and holds a 2014 construction permit to upgrade to 9,300 watts days/400 watts at night. The translator may be more likely to be upgraded. It’s currently at 101.3 and licensed to Sebring with 10 watts. But Salem’s got a CP modification to move it to Miami at 102.3, this time at 250 watts. Salem retains the “WKAT” call letters, and 1360 will change calls to WHIM – currently used on another Salem property in South Florida, the Christian teaching 1080 licensed to Coral Gables. Broker is Doyle Hadden, whose 5% fee of $175,000 will be paid jointly by Salem ($35,000) and the buyer ($140,000).

So why do you think Salem wants to keep the WKAT call letters? Considering they tend to program religious stations, WHIM might have been more appropriate.
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That's quite a loss. I'm guessing the WKAT calls have a certain heritage value in Miami even if they get moved to another signal so perhaps that's why they're keeping them.
 
strangelove said:
That's quite a loss.
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Then again, it's also a capital loss, finalized before the end of the year. Will offset any profits in the company. Not necessarily a bad thing.

Plus the buyer paid most of the commission. Not usually how it works.
 
The big radio groups drove up the prices of stations 20+ years ago. Now the prices are going down significantly.

Examples:

In 1997 one of i-Heart's predecessors paid north of $20 million dollars for the FM Country station in Hartford, Connecticut. Conversely they sold one of their other stations in the Hartford Market out of the Aloha Trust for $8 million in 2009.

2014 Connoisseur Media paid just $5.6 million for WDRC-FM in Hartford and their 4 AM stations that make up The Talk of Connecticut. While EMF paid north of $9 million for WCCC-FM and it's low-power AMer. The $9 million price tag was because EMF was in a bidding war with Connoisseur for WCCC.

In 2015 Full-Power Radio, a local Connecticut radio company paid $1.4 million for 2 AMs in Springfield Mass, 1 FM in the Providence Market, and 1 AM in suburban Hartford. Back in 2004 DMG (Davidson Media Group) paid $1.4 million for the suburban Hartford AM alone. And around 04 or 05 DMG paid more than $7 million for the Providence FM and a second FM in Rhode Island.
 
Did CBS ever come to terms with Miami-Dade about the Virginia Key tower site for WQAM and WKAT or are they still planning to move to the WOCN tower near the north end of town?
 
Every time I look at some of these translators, their patterns are completely different.
W267BW (channel 272) now shows a thin lobe pointing due west.
These pattern changes can markedly change the values of their parent stations.
This is why I would never rely on one enough to downgrade a master station.
WSRQ in Sarasota-Bradenton appears to be doing exactly this.
 
TheBigA said:
Then again, it's also a capital loss, finalized before the end of the year. Will offset any profits in the company. Not necessarily a bad thing.

Plus the buyer paid most of the commission. Not usually how it works.
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You are correct in your comments, BigA. Chalk one up for Doyle Hadden for making this sale happen. I wonder what this station is actually worth now and what it will sell for in five years. I wish I was "profitable" enough to be able to take the on-paper write-off on losing so much money. :)
 
Tibbs4 said:
You are correct in your comments, BigA. Chalk one up for Doyle Hadden for making this sale happen. I wonder what this station is actually worth now and what it will sell for in five years. I wish I was "profitable" enough to be able to take the on-paper write-off on losing so much money. :)
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Nearly every AM station in America is worth somewhere around 25% to 33% of its pre-recession value; the same is true but to only a slightly lesser extent for FMs.

WKAT was bought for $10 million in 2004. 13 years later, it goes for $3.5 million. Sounds about right.

A major secondary cause for the loss in value is the downgrading of the signal. From an ideally located transmitter site on an island in Biscayne Bay to an on-land site with a reduction in night power. While the station will nearly double day power, the day coverage will be the same. Night coverage will be less than a quarter of the current coverage.
 
Conservative talk might have done better, though I don't know if their signal reached the North Broward, Boca area.
 
mitchflorida said:
Conservative talk might have done a little bit better, though I don't know if their signal reached the North Broward, Boca area.
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It did not reach into upper Broward; the 5 mV/m did not even reach Ft Lauderdale itself. The new signal will actually hit Lauderdale, due to the transmitter site being farther north. Nights, with just 400 watts from the northern part of Little Haiti, will not cover much at all.
 
mitchflorida said:
Conservative talk might have done better, though I don't know if their signal reached the North Broward, Boca area.
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I recall WKAT's lineup being mostly national second and third-stringers and the biggest names they could boast (Michael Savage and Laura Ingraham) were already on WFTL, which does reach into North Broward. That probably ate into whatever audience, if any, WKAT may have scored in Broward. I was working in North Lauderdale at the time and 1360 pretty much vanished after sundown (and was marginal at best during the day) but WFTL was loud and clear.
 
AM radio in South Florida is dead. It's been dead a long time. Anything that's left is a shell of what it used to be. WKAT was a talk radio pioneer. That's history though in an area where most people haven't been there long enough to remember or care. Basically you're sifting through the ashes of what's left.
 
Mike Sheridan said:
AM radio in South Florida...'s been dead a long time.
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Well how can it be rejuvenated? Before we had GPS, I would have suggested NAV beacons. Maybe some sort of wired ADSL? (I know that's not what you would prefer!)
 
ai4i said:
Well how can it be rejuvenated?
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There aren't many options other than blowing it up and starting over. The assignments made to SF were all low power for some reason. That's where the mistake was made.
 
ai4i said:
Well how can it be rejuvenated?
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Programming the stations with something worth listening to would be a start

TheBigA said:
The assignments made to SF were all low power for some reason.
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Most of South Florida as we know it wasn't there when the first stations in the area were licensed, however I'm sure the history of how and why the signals were allotted to Miami is an interesting one
 
strangelove said:
Most of South Florida as we know it wasn't there when the first stations in the area were licensed, however I'm sure the history of how and why the signals were allotted to Miami is an interesting one
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The Miami metro was barely 100,000 when the FRC reorganizedd the AM band in 1927-1928... a move that, among other things opened the door for the 1-A Clear Channel stations. In other words, it was about the size of Flint, MI or Norfolk, VA and a tiny bit bigger than Shreveport, LA.

The two largest facilities were the produced if upgrades. WGBS (now WAQI) moved in from Broward and was able to increase power by shooting an amazing amount of night signal towards Bogotá and Quito. Similarly, Rex Rand's WINZ upgraded as much as they could, too, but they had big protection requirements in GA, PR and Mexico on 940.

The rest of the early facilities looked good in 30's. They covered the bulk of the population, none of which was many miles away from the corner of Biscayne and Flagler; 560 and 610 and 1360 were good facilities at the time, and 710 and 940 grew into bigness. Even some of the late arrivals, like Wammy in Miami on 1260 at the end of the 50's were marginal but managed to cover most of the market.

Then in 1980, we voted to have Arbitron combine Broward with Dade, and all the FM stations voted yes. The few of us with AM-only responsibilities voted "no" and lost. That was the real beginning of the end for viable AM operation in the market as there just were not enough full coverage stations to preserve interest in the band; the survivors were mostly the Spanish language stations and Niel Rogers... for a while.
 
DavidEduardo said:
Similarly, Rex Rand's WINZ upgraded as much as they could, too, but they had big protection requirements in GA, PR and Mexico on 940.
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When I was there, we protected an FCC monitoring station in Davie or Cooper City and Cuba in the daytime, and that Cuban null passed right through downtown Miami. I was told to never run the night power on the day pattern because the downtown noise level would lose listeners.
 
TheBigA said:
Like what? How will programming fix the static and sound quality?
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Kind of a tough nut to crack with homes filling up with battery chargers, LED lights, and other devices that cause interference on AM however FM translators can help alleviate some of the technical shortcomings
 
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