Buying FBOs

Basic Question: Does it make sense to buy an FBO?

Simple Answer: Buy it for pride, for vanity, or because you want to fly a route in or out of it. It is rather hard to make money off of landing fees (i.e. “passively”) alone.

More Details:

There are ~20,000 FBO’s in the game (of which ~50% have FBO’s on them), and 1,000 active players last month. Not all FBO’s are built out, so you can build one up, or buy an existing one. The prices on existing FBOs are kind of all over the map. 1-lots can start as low as $50k, 2-lots often start about $200k, and 3-lots start in ~$3.5 million.

I think many of the discount ones struggle because they don’t show up in the simulator (e.g. the airport has closed since FSE started) or are labeled different between FSE and the simulator¹. One of the oddities of the FSEconomy database (and perhaps general aviation generally) is that it is very heavily American, with lots of American airports and the rest of the world not as well represented. As a consequence, FBO outside the US (and in northern Europe in particular) can be priced at a premium and there are many fewer (if any) open spots are available. On the flip side, if you want to build a network de neuvo, the US might give you more options.

There is a complicating issue that even if you have the cash on hand, many FBO’s just never come up for sale; it’s not unheard of for an owner to hold on to an FBO for 10 years or more, and many major hubs seem to be picked up by groups running larger networks.

If yoi are considering building: assuming building materials at $4/kg² and supplies at $6.75/kg (the current computer provided price), to build up an FBO, including passenger terminal³, costs:

Size	Gates	Building Materials	BM Cost	Monthly Supply Cost6
1 lot	1	12,000 kg	$48,000	$2,052
2 lot	4	42,000 kg	$126,000	$8,208
3 lot	9	92,000 kg	$276,000	$18,468

For medium and large FBO’s, you’re not required to build out all lots initially, and thus save on your initial investment, at the risk that someone else might show up and build on the open lot(s) at “your” airport.

May want to consider building a repair shop at the same time (extra 2,000 kg of building material).

If you tare down a FBO, you get 60% of the material back. So it may be worthwhile to buy single lot FBOs under $28,800 just for material.

I still don’t have an answer to, What plane to use to move that material?

The third way to aquire an FBO is through the Lottery⁴. FBO’s enter the lottery when the owner has failed to supply them long enough⁵, and then they are put up for sale (through lottery tickets) to all. If you’re interested in a FBO, you can buy a ticket against it. Pricing is set by FBO size, multiplied by the number of lots occupied by the FBO:

FBO Size	per lot ticket price
Small (“1 lot”)	$50,000
Medium (“2 lot”)	v$100,000
Large (“3 lot”)	v$150,000

Most medium and large FBO’s are built on all avaialble lots, so you’re likely to need v$200k to bid on a medium FBO and v$450k to bid on a large FBO.

Being a lottery (or draw), it’s not a given that simply buying a ticket will be enough to win, but you can see if anyone else has bought a ticket yet. The lottery is open for a week for each round; any FBOs not sold this way are torn down and become available for anyone to come in and build an FBO anew.

Per the developers, the idea is you can pay for the upkeep for a FBO by flying the jobs it produces three times. It’s pretty hard to make a FBO pay for itself just on other people flying through. Let’s do some math: let’s assume each passenger pays v$700, and you keep 95% if you fly the passengers (convienantly ignoring any planenof fuel costs, which could cut this in half…), and 5% ground fees if someone else flies your passengers (this effectively assumes that you don’t own the FBO at the other end of the trip):

Size	Gates	Monthly Supply Cost	You Fly (assignments)	Ground Fees Only (assignmemts flown)
1 lot	1	$2,052	3.1	58.6
2 lot	4	$8,208	12.3	234.5
3 lot	9	$18,468	27.8	527.7

Considering that each gate will only generate 3 passengers at a time, flying that may passenger (3.1 / gate) seems doable in a month, but getting by on ground fees only seems tough. If you can point your trips to another FBO that you own, you will get the ground fees on both sides, but you also now have two FBOs to keep up. Rough math, if you could fly perfectly with a Cessna 208 (13 passengers, and ignoring booking fees) between two FBOs, you’d need 18 round trips for a pair of 2-lot FBOs and 41 round trips for a pair of 3-lot FBOs.

One final thing to consider is, How are you going to fly this network? (As we just determined that hoping on others to fly it probably isn’t a good business plan.) One option would be to rely on rental planes, but there is the risk of someone else taking off with the plane in question, or it breaking down without a way for you to repair it. So of you’re going to need a plane, just make sure it figures into your budget, or go plane shopping before you start building our your FBO empire.