Unfortunately, the theft of entrepreneurial endeavors is all too common in this part of the world.
It goes like this:
- Investor or group of investors put a lot of time and money into a risky investment such as starting a new business
- They manage, through great effort and time spent to actually succeed in this prospect
- The land owner then does nasty tricks to force the business creator out and then the land owner takes ownership of the business and carried on with said business.
This recently happened quite near where I live. Someone put a lot of time and effort into building a sports bar that took absolute ages to get off the ground, so to speak, because there is a lot of competition in this field. It took quite a while to convince people to give them a shot, but through a combination of refusing to give up, some creative promotions, and a very good social media presence, they started to become quite popular with both tourists and locals alike. This place was called Game On Bar and they were a place that people regularly went to not just for sporting events, but for a night out for some drinks just in a general sense.
Especially on nice days with good weather, seeing a large crowd gathered around the TV's was a regular situation and I, even though I am not a big drinker, went in there every now and then for a pint or two. The environment was good, had a lot of energy and while they focused primarily on Australian sports, they would feature all sort of other things and were regularly busy even on nights or days when there were no major sporting events taking place.
It was a success and it looked like the owners could finally relax a little bit because the "hard part" was now over.
Then the owner of the land came and told them that they were not going to renew their lease because of what I have heard was going to be yet another apartment complex and the owners of Game On were going to have to vacate the premises.
Now I'm going to go ahead and say that despite their hard work I DO think that it was really kind of stupid that they didn't secure a longer or more ironclad lease. It was only 2 years and that seems like a really short lease for someone to sink so much money into making a structure and investing so much into building a business. "Trust" is not something you can do in the business realm.
Anyway, the word went through the grapevine that the owner of the land actually had no intention of turning the land into an apartment complex because the land doesn't actually qualify for a structure of that magnitude. I do not know why it isn't but it just isn't.
Here's what they were really going to do
The owner was going to kick the business owners out, close it for a few weeks or so, and then open back up with the same business model using the space that the business developers had built and paid for. Before their arrival, this was just a vacant lot so the business owners built it all from scratch.
When the business owners found out that the land owner was not going to tear the structure down and actually wanted to simply steal their business, they went out of their way and spent more money to ensure that this would not be possible.
It is expected that when a business vacates a premises that they are going to take anything of value with them which in this case would have been the televisions, the furniture, the fridges and what not, but they will leave the structure behind. When the business owners found out that the land owner planned to simply use what they had built, they put in the extra time and money to ensure that there would be nothing left to use.
I heard that they have also spread the word to any of the spray paint idiots that vandalize places to go ahead and move on in and paint whatever they want.
I walked by there the other afternoon and saw a group of lads with sledgehammers and a cooler of beers taking turns smashing stuff and provided they don't cause any damage to the shared walls of the adjacent buildings this is not at all illegal. It is their property and they can do whatever they want with it.
Seems fair, right?
I asked someone why the glass doors were not smashed and they told me that "those can be removed and either sold or installed into a new business." The same is true of all the sinks and toilets that are on the other side of that door if they haven't already been removed.
They aren't finished yet though. These metal structures are too strong to be removed with hand tools so the business owners are having some heavy equipment brought by in the next few days to destroy that as well.
When they are done, the would-be-thief land owner will have an empty and unusable plot of land that will require a large amount of money to convert into anything, let alone a popular bar.
Also, word has spread throughout the community that this land-owner cannot be trusted, so he is going to have experience a great deal of difficulty in getting anyone else to move into this spot, despite its rather prime location.
I am enjoying the justice here but still think it is such a shame that the land owner had a good thing going, he had constant revenue and the area had a bar and sports hangout that everyone enjoyed. Then greed got in the way.
I would imagine that this plot of land will remain unused for a long time to come since according to sources, nothing taller than 2 stories is allowed to be built on it without major alterations to the bedrock - something about engineering and inability to build anything on the soil that won't fall down.
Therefore, it is not a viable location for another apartment building and can only be a small business without major investment that I don't think very many people are going to be willing to do, especially if they do not own the land it is on.
What started as a scheming plan to get a free business has turned into a trash heap, and that is exactly what this greedy land owner deserves to receive. I sincerely hope that his/her reputation is permanently soiled as well, and that nobody will have anything to do with them in the future.