According to brokerage firm Kalil & Co., a deal has been struck sending a pair of FM stations in the Columbia SC market to Davis Media, a radio group already active in Virginia and North Carolina.
The stations are Carolina 92.1 WWNU-FM and Country Legends 94.3 WWNQ-FM.
The seller is Double O Radio Corporation.
The buyer is headed by Thomas Davis, who according to Kalil owns stations in and around Norfolk VA and Wilmington NC. He also has newspaper interests.
Davis is teaming with Kirk Litton, who is exiting a position with Radio One, forming his own company – Triple M Broadcasting – and joining with Davis to form yet another company – Hometown Columbia LLC, which will be the company the duo uses for the acquisition of the FMs.
“Having been in broadcast radio sales for the last 18 years, I’m excited about this opportunity to step into an ownership role in partnership with Davis Media, and to implementing their radio-digital model that has shown such strong success in other markets already. It’s the kind of transformation traditional radio stations keeps talking about; and I don’t know of any that have had the success of Davis’ New Newspaper,” said Litton.
WWNU is a Class C3 on 92.1 MHz with 15 kW @ 427’, and WWNQ is a Class A with 2.55 kW @ 446’. Both cover the city of Columbia.
Terms of the deal were not revealed.
RBR-TVBR observation: We may not yet know the 2012 price for these stations, but we are confident the price has gone down since Double O bought them. You won’t believe the price these stations fetched the last time they were sold back in 2004.
WWNQ was a mere CP at the time. According to a 5/26/04 contract, it cost $4.725M.
WWNU was WJES at the time it was sold pursuant to terms of a 7/1/04 contract. It had just received FCC permission on 1/30/04 to upgrade from a Class A licensed to Saluda to its current C3 status in Irmo. The price: $4.7M.
Price for the pair, which came from separate sellers: $9.425M
Anybody think they hit a price point even remotely in that area this time around? We didn’t think so.
