Mark Janbakhsh and his TBLC Media already have acquired one Spanish-formatted AM station from Davidson Media in the Nashville market. Now the company has a deal to acquire another.
The newly acquired station is WMDB-AM. It will join a duopoly with WNVL-AM. Both stations are licensed to Nashville.
Davidson is headed by Chris McMurray.
The price for WMDB will be $225K cash. An LMA will be put into place and will run until the deal closes.
WMDB, which calls itself El Sol, is not the biggest fish in the Nashville pond. It’s a Class D on 880 kHz, with a serviceable and non-directional 2.5 kW daytime signal. However, at night its scant 2 Watts of power are better suited to serving a goldfish bowl rather than an entire pond.
WNVL, known as Activa, came in a deal with Davidson dating to March 2012, for about $700K. It’s a full-timer, a Class C on 1240 kHz with 1 kW-U, ND.
RBR-TVBR observation: This is a good news-bad news story, and it all has to do with station values.
The good news is that we haven’t been writing quite as many stories like this – and by that we mean we aren’t writing stories about station values plummeting from one transfer to the next. And of course, this is good news for the buyer.
Here’s the bad news: The two stations have been acquired by TBLC for about $925K, give or take (the final price for WNVL was variable, between $675K and $710K).
In a company reorganization which took place in August 2008, their combined value was listed at $2.584M. So the price has been more than halved.
But it gets worse. Davidson bought both stations in the spring of 2005 in separate deals. WNVL (calls were WNSG at the time) came from Mortenson Broadcasting for $2.7M, and WMDB came from Babb Broadcasting for $1.6M, a total of $4.3M. The current sales price for the pair is less than a quarter of that total.