Permanent Structure Flip Or Flop?

[Craigmeister]

I was chatting with a vendor friend tonight about upcoming faires this fall.  He mentioned that he saw a permanent structure booth for sale at the Texas Renfest a few years ago for a real good price.  He said the pictures made it look like it could use a little sprucing up and how he would have changed the frontage.

My wife watches a lot of HGTV shows about flipping houses.  It made me wonder if anyone flips permanent structures at Renfaires.  That would definitely be a show that I would watch.  Does anyone know if bigger faires even upgrade available booths before they go up for sale or do they just let owners make improvements after they buy them.  Do faire owners have to approve sales of booths? 

[groomporter]

MNRF is the only "hard fair" we do, but the rules there are that you cannot buy a booth unless you have been already juried in as an approved artist. In fact it used to be that MNRF would not even release the list of booths for sale unless you were already accepted. They also reserve the right to examine and approve all purchase agreements on booths. I assume most big fairs have some similar clauses, so it's unlikely someone would be allowed to come in just to flip booths except maybe as a one-time thing for one of the home repair shows for the publicity.

Booth owners are responsible for all improvements and repairs and anything major generally has to be approved by the fair including changing paint colors. The only time I see management upgrading a booth for sale is if it were one that was abandoned by the owner, or the artist was kicked out for some reason. But generally, the new owner would mostly likely just buy it "as-is" and be responsible for repairs and improvements. Our booth was basically "condemned" by MNRF so we were able to buy it cheap and came up with an idea to improve it without starting from the ground-up.

The Des Moines fair was going to experiment with offering to maintain booths in return for the ability to lease them out for events in the off-season if the regular owner of the booth could not attend, or did not fit the theme. But I've never heard how that worked out