For Sale
I hit the trifecta yesterday—an email, a text, and a voice mail, each from a different person, but all on the same topic: “Hey, what’s going on at the radio station?”
Seems each person had driven by our studios in downtown Waterloo and saw a very large “for sale” sign in the window and wondered what was up.
The short of it is this: the building we are in is for sale; the radio station is not. We are still very much open for business.
Think of how you used to listen to music at home. You might have a multi-component stereo system with a radio tuner, amplifier, turntable, CD or cassette deck, and speakers. Took up a lot of room, even if you had a small system.
Think of how you listen to music now. You might pull up a song stored on your smartphone and send it with bluetooth to your TV and it comes out of those speakers. However you do it, technology means your system takes up a lot less space than it did 40 years ago.
Same for a radio station. Those same technology advancements mean we can do the same things we used to—actually, even more things—in less physical space and with smaller devices. So a building built for how we did radio 40 years ago now has a lot of unused space in it. So we’re giving a different business the chance to grow into this space, and we’ll move to a space that best fits what we need.
KXEL by my research has had three homes in the past 82+ years…first in downtown Waterloo, then east of town, then back in downtown Waterloo. This has been a great setup and has produced some fine broadcasting. But the ability to customize a space for how radio is done today is something we’re looking forward to. You may not even notice the difference, but we hope it means a better product delivered more efficiently.
So, to recap…still very much open for business, still broadcasting…but yes, the building is for sale.
