The Offer

[maipenrai]

Well Frankn, they can turn it down, for the simple reason that they smell even bigger money! If the cache is so big, then he is probably thinking that $8M would be even better! That gives him more room to play, either do it himself, or figure out a way to get someone else to do it. Just think about it, if he joined this or another site, and offered $10K to dig his property and find something of his, everyone of us would jump at the chance. He could have a hundred diggers out there, and the finder gets the 10k. You probably shouldnt have let the cat out of the bag, by telling him how much could be there.

Your way of thinking, is that you are "giving" him $4M, but to him, it is just the opposite, you are "taking" $8M of "his" money. Even $4m would be a lot, for most of us to accept, that we are "giving" it away.

 

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[Frankn]

maipenrai, here's my view on that. He knows it might not be on his property, so I don't think he will pay anyone to dig in advance. He has no idea where it might be on his property, if it is on it at all. Can you imagine how much it would cost him to fill those 100 holes and remove all the trash left? You keep saying "his money". Suppose a relative of the one that cached it claims it. That leaves him out 10 big ones. If someone offered to give me $4M of a cache he wanted to look for on my property I would say, go to it. The way I look at it, he is giving me $4M that I didn't have before. Yea, I can see where greed playes a big factor in The Offer. A lot of people aren't satisfied with getting a big bundle of money, they want more!
This cache is on about 9 acres of land in a mountionus area. He has no clues to narrow it down. I really don't think he could get anyone to look for it under those conditions and if he could get someone to look for it, they would stand a better chance of dying from a snake bite than finding it.

 

[Kentucky Kache]

If someone offered to give me $4M of a cache he wanted to look for on my property I would say, go to it. The way I look at it, he is giving me $4M that I didn't have before.

But you wouldn't do it for $3M? 3 million would be your share, but you won't consider it because you wanted 4 million? Are you serious?

 

[Frankn]

Kentucky, What you quoted was a different example of an offer to hunt on my land! You are just looking at the $$$. I take the whole situation into consideration. If I looked for a month and found nothing, I am out all my time, work and expenses. On the other hand the land owner has lost nothing. You have to put a value on the RISK factor
It's like drilling for oil. Sure the oil belongs to the land owner, but it is of no value to him until someone else brings it up, and I am sure the driller gets the lions share of the oil value to cover his cost, effort and risk.

 

[Kentucky Kache]

View attachment 629755Kentucky, What you quoted was a different example of an offer to hunt on my land! You are just looking at the $$$. I take the whole situation into consideration. If I looked for a month and found nothing, I am out all my time, work and expenses. On the other hand the land owner has lost nothing. You have to put a value on the RISK factor
It's like drilling for oil. Sure the oil belongs to the land owner, but it is of no value to him until someone else brings it up, and I am sure the driller gets the lions share of the oil value to cover his cost, effort and risk.

That's why we do this for the pleasure of doing it. Anything found is just icing on the cake. Of course we want to find treasure, but the real treasure is the hunt. The way I see it, if I enjoy the hunt then I've lost nothing, even if I find nothing.

But my point was, who wouldn't take a chance on 3 million dollars, just the same as 4 million dollars? How many millions does one man need?

 

[ppratt]

Can we get this thread locked. I'm tired of this. We have 41 pages of nothing.

 

[SHERMANVILLE ILLINOIS]

Give it another 15 - 20 pages.

What good posts are made of. Like good coffee, aged.

have a good un.....
SHERMANVILLE

 

[Kentucky Kache]

Can we get this thread locked. I'm tired of this. We have 41 pages of nothing.

You want to control the threads? Why not just stop reading the ones you don't like?

 

[ppratt]

You want to control the threads? Why not just stop reading the ones you don't like?

MMMM theres a thought

 

[Frankn]

Kentucky, It's not the money that matters to me, it's the fairness of the deal. Oh yes, the moneys nice, but it gets kind of tainted when you have to bend over and get the shaft to get it.
Pratt, I don't really think you understand what is going on in this post. It is kind of an exchange of thoughts and viewpoints. There are no right or wrongs here, only ideas that might or might not work in different situations.
Shermanville, I hope that is French Roast in that pot.

 

[Kentucky Kache]

Kentucky, It's not the money that matters to me, it's the fairness of the deal. Oh yes, the moneys nice, but it gets kind of tainted when you have to bend over and get the shaft to get it.

I wish someone would shaft me with 3 million dollars.
Actually, just the opportunity to search where I think a cache might be would be great. Anything at all offered by the landowner would be even greater. That's just my views on it.

 

[Frankn]

Kentucky, Maybe I am wrong when I hold my standards of a fair split above $3M, But then again I sleep well at nite

Here's an example. I bought the burned remains of my old MH from the insurance co. It sat in my front yard for a month. A mechanic saw it and offered me $6K for it, but said he would need a week to get the money.I said OK and we shook on it. A couple of days later a second mechanic saw it and offered me $7K for it. He said since the other guy had nothing on paper He had no claim. I told him my word was worth far more than $7K. The mechanic that bought it has fixed my truck 3 times for free.

 

[Kentucky Kache]

View attachment 630139Kentucky, Maybe I am wrong when I hold my standards of a fair split above $3M, But then again I sleep well at nite

Here's an example. I bought the burned remains of my old MH from the insurance co. It sat in my front yard for a month. A mechanic saw it and offered me $6K for it, but said he would need a week to get the money.I said OK and we shook on it. A couple of days later a second mechanic saw it and offered me $7K for it. He said since the other guy had nothing on paper He had no claim. I told him my word was worth far more than $7K. The mechanic that bought it has fixed my truck 3 times for free.

I couldn't agree more about how you handled the motor home situation. That was the honest and right thing to do. But I don't see the connection with the buried treasure situation.

 

[Frankn]

Kentucky, the connection is that getting a fair, honest deal is more important to me than the money. I am not a grab what you can and run type person. I would rather leave the money than settle for a deal where I felt I was taken advantage of. Some would sell there soul for whatever they could get, but I am not among them.

 

[Sam 8]

Principled people are becoming a rarity these days.

 

[Kentucky Kache]

I don't see this as principles, I see it as greed.

 

[Frankn]

Kentucky, can you please explain that for me? His counter offer was $6M for him and $3M for me and $3M for my partner. How do you see this as being greedy by me? All I asked for was an even split of $4M each. To me that's fair not greedy.

 

[Stand Watie]

There's no way I would accept that offer if I was the land owner. What if you had another guy in your group, would it be a split of 75/25? There are only two parties to this.......yours and the land owner......50/50. How would you feel if it was just you hunting for the cache and the landowner told you that since he's married he should get 2/3 of the find and you should get only 1/3?

I agree with limegold. The owner is looking at you and your partner as one party in the deal with him being the other party. That seems to be a fair offer under these circumstances and it's the deal I would hold out for if I were the land owner.

I know you and your partner have done a lot of work, but you weren't asked to do it by the owner, y'all took that on of your own accord. When you two started the research you knew the owner might not make any kind of deal with you, y'all simply hoped he would and you went ahead with the work. Had the owner come to y'all first, asking y'all to do the research and the work of locating and digging the cache, then your offer of 1/3 could be negotiated before you started. But from what you wrote that isn't what happened. Y'all went ahead hoping he would let you search.

I think you and your partner are lucky that the landowner is willing to do a 50/50 deal under the circumstances. He could have said "no" and found someone else to do it on a percentage, something like 20%, of the take if there is any. There's a lot of metal detectorist that would take that deal in a heartbeat.

You have to keep in mind that you do this stuff because you enjoy it, it's not like it's actually work to you. That same reason is the reason he could get someone else that enjoys the hobby to do it for 10% or 20%. A lot of people enjoy this stuff.

So my opinion in summary, take the deal the owner is offering and feel lucky. Just my 2¢

Good luck. Keep us updated.

Edited to add: I didn't realize the age of this thread when I made this post. Nor did I realize how many posts had been made to it. Sorry.

 

[Frankn]

Stand, I got to admitt that when I do cache hunting research I enjoy the challenge, but I am in it for the money. It is a form of speculation. In other words you do the work in advance, but expect to be paid for it. It's like an artis paints a picture on speculation, but when he sells he expects to be paid for his time.

I have two questions for you, 1: How could the land owner go to anybody when he didn't even know that there was a possibility that there was a cache on his property? 2: How could we approach the land owner, before we did the research, when the research was required to locate the cache site and the land owner?


Most research on caches is done prior to contacting the land owner for the reason listed above, but you still expect to collect on that research. It is far different than searching a property to see what you can find. in that case no research is required so 50/50 is proper.

 

[khpony]

Frankn.....most posters still don't really understand the the amount of time and expended resources that goes into researching a cache. I think you've spent more than 2 years on this one alone. We have to be working on several at a time since it's not a cut and dried process. There's no manual that lays out the steps we go thru researching a cache. Sometimes I may go several weeks without working on a lead only to accidentally stumble on another piece of the puzzle and then I'm on the chase again. That's one of the reasons why we work on several at one time(because we often hit dead ends). Example, one we've been working on for 6 months now was at the point where we would need to get boots on the ground. It's a 8 hour drive from here. We're currently planning a 2 week trip to Colorado in June so we shelved it until then. We'd actually pass within a hour of the site and could check it out then. That was 3 weeks ago. Well last week I was exploring the net looking for something completely different when this cache appeared in one of my google searches and it was different info that I hadn't seen before. Long story short someone else had planned a search for it and discovered that the land was owned by a billionaire back east and it's heaviny posted stopping them from searching for it. Well one would think that's the end of the story but now I have more research to do. Thanks to an attorney friend of mine I know that when you purchase porperty in Colorado one rarely gets the water rights with it and our cache is in the creek. Now I need to check the property records to see if he got the rights. If not then the search is back on. My point to this long post is one never knows where the next part of the puzzle will lead and it's usually takes considerable time and resources ($$) to work it out completely. That's why we work on several at a time.