Your Questions About Maynard's Fine Arts Theatre Place

I little more than a month ago, people submitted questions to Steve Trumble and Melanie Perry, owners of Fine Arts Theatre Place. They answered those questions in a blog post a couple of weeks ago. Some people asked silly/fun questions, but there were serious question raised. I think questions were answered in the order they got them, so if you go to the post, don't think that the most important question is at the top. It most certainly isn't.

For me the most important question was why they even needed our money. I wasn't going to pitch in until I got a good answer. I'll save you the trouble of searching for it. I think this answer explains a lot and makes me feel confident about supporting them.

A brief history of the recent past and an understanding of why we need help in raising funds for the digital conversion:

We purchased the Fine Arts theatre property to invest in real estate in downtown Maynard because we saw it’s growth and rental income potential. When we were initially looking at the building in Winter 2012-13, the property was faced with the strong possibility of being sold to developers, looking to knock it down. We both had sentimental ties to this theatre and decided that we could invest in the real estate, while saving the cultural icon. With the purchase last Spring, came the transfer of an 8 plus year tenant, renting and running the theatre for the previous owner. We thought this was the perfect situation- we could spend 250-300k to fix up the building and remodel the exterior; while we had a tenant rent the actual theatre from us and operate their business out of it. While we were aware of the additional costs affiliated with the digital conversion, we were not planning on assuming these costs, for what was originally intended to be a “non-owner occupied” commercial property investment. It was not our intention or previous experience running a movie theatre business, hence we did not account for our tenant’s costs within their industry and operating expenses.