EXISTING STRUCTURES:
Find a free span building. Or at least a building where the poles are eighty feet apart, or more, so you can squeeze a field in. You can build a smaller field and it will work as long as you don’t have a competitor. But once a full size competitor comes along, you're in trouble. Most full size fields are in the 175 to 200 feet in length and 75 to 85 feet wide. You need ceiling height of 24 feet or more.

It’s hard to tell from outside if buildings are free span. Lots of times they have a domed roof. Usually older buildings like Pay and Pak. 84 Lumber buildings come in three sizes. Their largest is 200 by 100. Those are good buildings but not well insulated. I’ve bought one and come close to two more. Roller skating rinks generally don’t have poles, nor do ice skating rinks. Airplane hangars work and buildings where they use to build pre fab homes, trusses for houses, or aluminum recycling centers. Tennis clubs go through cycles and sometimes they are really struggling and acceptable alternatives with high ceilings. You need at least three to four tennis courts. Mayflower, Bekins, and Allied storage buildings work about a third of the time. Find a phone book three or four years old, then take a current phone book. Look up the businesses I've mentioned from four years ago and then see how many of them are still in the phone book. If the listing is gone they might be vacant now.

If you have a population of 300,000 to 400,000 within a 25 minute circle of your facility you can make money. This is not 100%. I saw a facility in San Diego five minutes from the Pacific Ocean. If you believe in my 25 minute circle theory, you have just lopped off 25% off your potential customer base. Dolphins play football, not soccer. Since this facility was outside, at night fog would roll in around the 10pm game and the field would get real slippery, increasing your odds of player and spectator lawsuits. In another city a facility was built up against a river which had no accessible bridges within fifteen minutes. So while they had a great customer base within 25 minutes, they couldn’t get to 50% of it because of access problems. Natural barriers are something to watch for. In business you do everything you can to increase your odds. Cutting off potential customers isn't increasing your odds. I saw a facility in Denver years ago which was on the north east side of town. It was flush up against Stapleton Airport on one side, Rocky Mountain Arsenal on another, and the new airport. It was suicide. Nobody lives in any of those locations.

I found over 90% of existing buildings on my own. I have driven many cities in the country in my 79 Ford Fairmont. The Fairmont got between 400,000 and 500,000 miles on it before it got towed off. One of my neighbors kept reporting me to the smog enforcement division and pretty soon the tickets were more than the value of the car. My 1979 Ford Fairmont broke in the winter of 95 and I lost it. However, after two and a half years of mourning, I bought a 1981 Fairmont with only 120,000 miles on it. I know how long these cars last and everything pretty much that can go wrong with it, I can fix it. It lasted until 2004 somewhere.

I’ll pick a city at random out of my map drawer. It’s Las Vegas. Pull out a map of your city, it’ll work the same.

I bought two maps of Vegas. The first one I’ll mark all over. The second I just use to mark stuff that has possibilities. Vegas has a north south freeway, I-15 and a east west freeway known as 95. You’ll need binoculars (around your neck), pocket recorder (left side by the front seat), video recorder (between front seats). Tape your expendable map to the other front seat, (unless you have a passenger).

DAY ONE:
Where the two freeways intersect, I broke the town into four areas. I drove a different area each day. Vegas is hot, so I started early. Drive freeways first, they're elevated, you can see farther, and cover more distance quicker. Make notations on your second map where you see a building that might work. Take your first map and highlight with magic marker the areas you have driven so you don’t accidently waste time driving the same areas again. Then you draw squares for the area you’re going to cover. Make it as much as possible along natural boundaries . Make as many right hand turns as you can. Left hand turns eat up time. Park and eat your meals when the streets are busiest. You need a good stop every three or four hours to map where you’ve been and what areas increase your odds the most. On your map, see the wide straight streets. In most instances those are industrial areas. Those are prime candidates for free span. Pick out airports. Cities don’t generally allow residential areas in landing and take off paths and prefer to have industrial sites there. Look around the airports. Railroad tracks have good odds of having a free span building. Half of my existing buildings have a railroad spur. Read the streets. On my Vegas map I saw a street labeled Industrial. I found a building, but it was being used by a night club to park cars on Friday and Saturday nights. They wouldn’t sell. Industrial neighborhoods frequently have industrial names. End of first day, nine hours of driving, I found one potential building.

DAY TWO:
I drove the northwest side of Vegas. I found one building. When I finally convinced them to let me in, it had poles. They can be removed, but it usually makes the cost of the building prohibitive. I have no experience doing away with poles. I spoke to a guy in Cincinnati who said he removed a bunch of them from a building to do indoor soccer and inline hockey. It was expensive.

DAY THREE:
On the third day I found a corner building in a shopping center. It appeared to be a church. As I was walking into the lobby I noticed I had wiped my feet on what appeared to be indoor soccer turf. I asked if they would be interested in selling and could I take a tour of the building. When I walked into the back of the building you could see where the dasher board poles used to be affixed to the floor and they were using the turf for their day care. It had formerly been an indoor field. I don’t know all of the details but my impression was the mortgage payment was in the $10,000 to $15,000 range each month, in the 80's that was a lot. They would sell, but I never got them below $1,000,000 and some change and again, in the 80's that was a lot. I can’t make the payments.

DAY FOUR:
I got a tip that there was an ice skating rink on the east side of town. After getting directions and driving for two hours I found it was destroyed in an explosion years ago. That happened to me in Houston also, they told me to go look at the building where they stored the Goodyear Blimp. When I got there it had been demolished a year earlier.

I got a tip there were roller skating rinks for sale. I talked to the owners and found all the roller skating rinks in town were owned by the same family. A family who didn't want to sell.

Later that day I found a former tennis/health club on Swenson road just north of UNLV that looked like it had all kinds of potential. There was a sign saying “Leasing storage spaces soon, call ...........” . I negotiated but they wanted more than I could pay. I hear now their thinking of turning it into a several different sports facility.

DAY FIVE:
Finishing up loose ends, I found a building at Cheyenne Avenue and Losee, owned by McDonalds corporation, and was currently a recyling center. I walked through it pretending to be important. I sent them letters to the home address in Illinois and they never responded.

Later that day I found a building in Southwest Vegas that appeared to be real close to the size I needed. It was a gated building with no cars in the parking lot. But I do most of my driving on Saturdays, Sundays, and holidays to cut down traffic. So for me, no cars in the parking lot is not necessarily a sign of a vacant building. Since I couldn’t get inside the fenced area, I paced it off from outside. I've found one of my steps is 2.5 feet. I pace a building, times it by 2.5, and that’s the length of the building within a couple of feet. UPDATE: I've since learned to just count the right foot steps and times it by five. It's easier to do the math.

In estimating the height I look at the doors on the side of the building. They are usually around seven feet. Then I mentally imagine more doors on top of that one and do the math by the imagined number of doors on top of each other. Now, I've been doing this so long I can smell free span.

I've had a few less than pleasing experiences checking out buildings. I had a bad one going over the fence in Midland Texas and was caught by the police. In the same town I found a chop shop where they were cutting up cars when I snuck in. I was chased by two dogs in Colorado Springs when the building I tried to get into turned out to be a storage facility for Desert Storm, and I was detained by security in Salt Lake in a building I wound up buying.

When you stop to reassess where in a town you’re driving next, try to pick high spots. Cities like Vegas and Phoenix, where they have very few trees or landscaping, you can visually drive large chunks of the city with your binoculars. Videotape buildings that might work. Include as many angles as you can and get an address. Mark each potential site on your good map, call it location number two, or whatever you designate it. At the end of a trip there are so many buildings they become a blur. Get the address in case you want to look up ownership later or need a real estate agent. You’ll notice things you didn’t see before when you stop/pause it on your VCR. Use your hand held recorder to record areas you want to do next. Ideas you have that might save time tomorrow. I listen to my hand held in the morning before I go out each morning. I remember things I learned yesterday.

Sometimes you can see in a window of a vacant building, but have trouble judging the space between walls, poles, or interior height of buildings. Start small. I remember a building in El Paso. I couldn’t get inside but I could see in the windows. It had one foot tiles on the floor. I counted one foot tiles to the first ceiling light. Then one foot tiles to the second ceiling light. When I knew that they were consistent, I counted ceiling lights to the back of the building. I couldn’t see the one foot tiles at the back of the building but I could see the ceiling lights. I measured the height of a brick going up the outside of the building. Counted the number of bricks on the inside and got my clearance. I was able to measure the length of the building, the height, and I walked the width.

If you fly to a location and decide to rent a car. Then get a smaller car. Smaller cars work better. I frequently suddenly change directions or flip U-turns because I saw a building on a side street as I was driving down a main artery. I need one of those bumper stickers that says "I brake for hallucinations." If there are two of you, each of you pick a side of the street to watch for potential buildings while you’re driving.