On May 28, in the suburbs of Sharya (Kostroma region), the first private cemetery in our country was inaugurated. The initiators of its appearance were not only its owner, Evgeny Golovin, but also local residents, the city and district administration.
Cemetery "Zagorodnoye"
At one o'clock in the afternoon on the outskirts of this small town, near the territory surrounded by a gray, even palisade with sparse, neat white columns, twenty people were shifting from foot to foot. There were Lyudmila Kosterova, the head of the public reception of the plenipotentiary representative of the President of the Russian Federation in the Central Federal District for the city of Sharya and the Sharya region, and a film crew from a local TV channel, and correspondents from newspapers, as well as just guests and simply curious people. Black umbrellas, dark outfits, flowers... It seems that the people gathered here came to a funeral. Even the sun, which was watching the guests gather at the cemetery, could not stand it and for the first time all week crawled into puffy gray rain clouds.
Everyone was waiting for the main characters of the action - the priest and the owner.
“Something is late,” the two guests talk in a whisper and look around. - They could have warned us by phone. Still, we don’t live in the tundra. We would have arrived later.
Directly above the heads of the public on the gate, in large black letters, neatly written: “Ritual Services Agency. Zagorodnoye Cemetery.” The quiet rustle of wide tires on the sand, and, finally, everything was assembled. A light rain began to fall from the sky.
Well, let’s start, I guess,” Evgeny Golovin, the owner of the cemetery, greeted the audience by opening the door of the jeep.
“We can begin,” said Archpriest Seraphim, who had arrived to consecrate the cemetery, in a deep voice, having managed in about two minutes to put on a festive golden phelonion, straighten the pages of the psalmist, already quite crumpled from excitement, and pour from two one and a half liter plastic bottles holy water into a silver vat. But as soon as the priest waved the censer and the psalm-reader struck the first note, someone from the crowd suggested cutting the ribbon, just in case, “according to the age-old Russian tradition.” After a long search, the scissors were found in one of the guests' cosmetic bags.
It seems to me that you need to cut from this side towards the cemetery, they say, welcome from this world to the next,” one of the ladies suggested with a graceful wave of her hand, the rest silently supported her.
The dull short blades of the scissors dug into the fabric, tearing its flesh in vain for about five minutes. In the end, the threads gave up, and the path to the cemetery was open. By this point the rain had turned to downpour. A whisper passed through the crowd: “The downpour is coming - Sharya is bringing happiness.” The priest smoked incense to those gathered and read several pages from the sayings of Peter Mogila and the Serbian Breviary, sometimes stuttering on difficult-to-pronounce ancient Slavic words.
Look, someone is already buried there,” one of the guests began to chatter, shouting over the holy father and the chants, pointing his finger at the wreaths and the fresh mound.
Yes, he couldn’t wait for the opening, we were persuaded for a very long time, and in the end we agreed,” explained the owner. - A young guy crashed on our roads on a motorcycle. His name was Alexander Pankov.
Not paying attention to the opening "heavenly abysses", the priest, under a wall of rain, made three processions of the cross, sprinkled everyone with abundant holy water and, ending the ritual, said: "Glory to you, Lord, it is done!" Then he carefully folded the Bible, got into his car and drove away.
The sun came out of the sky, turning the downpour into a mushroom rain.
Your beloved city can sleep peacefully
You see, everything happened naturally with the cemetery,” the owner of the funeral agency, Evgeniy Golovin, began to tell after the grand opening and consecration. - I started doing this “sad” craft seven years ago. The idea arose after I spent almost a week organizing the funeral of my friend Victor. I, a local resident, was running around like a madman, signing the necessary papers, driving around the whole city and suburbs in search of a coffin, wreaths, knocking out, almost in the literal sense of the word, a place in the cemetery. After everything was found and the funeral took place, I realized that this industry needs to be developed. So I got down to business: behind me I have an unfinished pedagogical university and an unacquired profession as a labor teacher, the army and three years of service in the police. And so I rented a small room in the local House of Culture. It was so tight that only me on a chair and a table could fit in there. He hung a sign “Funeral supplies” on the door and hung the same sheets on all the pillars of the city. And so it began, I went to manufacturers in an area twenty kilometers from the city, looking for good coffins. We have a lot of sawmills, but to knock them down similar thing they were taken only from raw wood, without even upholstering it with fabric. I spent the night painting and decorating the coffins. Slowly the business developed, people came to me.
As soon as the funeral service began to work on the principle of a conveyor belt, and the small room turned into a spacious two-story house-office, Golovin began to think about the cemetery. By that time, he had already built a chapel opposite the office.
The chapel is for the ease of saying goodbye to relatives,” Evgeniy Nikolaevich continued, not daring to leave his new brainchild. - We have a tradition that has remained since the village times - it is necessary to say goodbye to the dead in the house. There is no such room in the city, and since we are still a fairly large city and we even have six-story residential buildings, it is difficult to carry a body back and forth without an elevator. So I built a chapel according to my design, a local artist made a crucifix and painted icons. In November, Father Seraphim consecrated it, with the approval of the Kostroma diocese. And after that, the only thing that didn’t suit me and my clients in business was the complete lack of space in our three city cemeteries. They are not just overcrowded, by all laws and universal human standards they should have been closed ten years ago. Their condition is terrible, I asked the administration some time ago to allow them to restore order there and remove all the excess garbage. But they refused, as well as to allocate land within the city. But the administration of the Sharya district supported the idea of a new private cemetery. In February we began to draw up documents. And in April we were already allowed to do preparatory work. So now my clients will have even fewer problems.
A place at Zagorodny is not that expensive - only 700 rubles, plus a monthly subscription fee if it is difficult to care for the grave yourself. True, Golovin cannot yet say anything intelligible about the size of the payment; not everything has been fully calculated.
In total, 21 thousand graves will be laid out on 15 hectares of cemetery land. So, at the rate of two people per day, the cemetery will be filled to capacity just in the 49 years allocated to Evgeny Golovin for this enterprise. At the end of the term, anything can be created on it. For example, Golovin’s predecessor was going to build a flax mill on the site of the current churchyard, but there was not enough money.
“I can’t buy land, it’s too expensive for me,” the entrepreneur continues. - But I rented it for 49 years. Of course, the district administration will charge some kind of rent, but the amount has not yet been discussed. For us, the exact same laws of the Russian Federation apply as for the state “last refuge of the body.” And then, take, for example, the state cemetery in Sharya, they bury people there under power lines, which is impossible to do, because they are often repaired. So there, all the relatives who got places were warned that the graves could be demolished at any moment.
It is not possible to “move in” with the dead in the new cemetery, as well as to bury urns, unlike in the state graveyard. But if the client wants to “lie down” next to a relative, he must pay in advance for two or three seats, depending on the size of the family. They say that Golovin already has a line of people eager to take care of “the last of their people” in advance.
There will be no problems with this, we will accommodate everyone! - Golovin assures us goodbye.
The city administration remains silent about the entrepreneur’s cheerful prospects, citing the fact that the experience is new and the business is young. But in the region, managers turned out to be more optimistic.
It’s good that he’s opening a cemetery,” Irina Lebedeva, chairman of the committee for managing property and land relations of the administration of the Sharya district of the Kostroma region, commented to RG. - All our churchyards are in a deplorable state, everything is overcrowded. And then I think that a place in a private cemetery will not cost too much. After all, we discussed with him that prices should be affordable, almost like at state graveyards. Moreover, the people supported us. We carried out monitoring in winter and interviewed all residents of the city and villages. It turned out that the majority voted for a new and clean, albeit private, cemetery. My only wish was about the prices. And then Golovin himself is a respected man, well-known in the city. He does charity work, helps churches, administrations.
Oh, the roads: dust and potholes
Sharya is a small town. Only 39 thousand people live in it, but, according to residents of the Kostroma region, after Kostroma it is in second place in terms of crime rate.
Here, large jeeps often explode, private houses go up in flames, and young people, in their free time from idleness, shoot from Kalashnikovs at monuments, lanterns and store windows,” one of the local residents, guide Anna, who was waiting for a regular bus to the village of Kozlovo, shared with RG .
According to local legend, the name of the city, strange for the Russian language, comes from the Tatar word “sharya”, which means “pit”.
The city really does look a lot like a big hole: old black two-story houses bend under the weight of their own roofs, and it seems like they are about to fall apart, and the roads are generally more like a colander, only flatter and elongated.
Of course, there is asphalt on the roads in some places. But mostly it either puffs up towards the sun, as after a nuclear explosion, or disappears without a trace in the depths of the earth. So, for example, in this city, for the first time I “flyed” in a passenger car, as if from a springboard. The car was speeding along one of the main streets of the city. Suddenly the asphalt potholes ended along with the asphalt, and about a meter away from us the road continued, albeit half a meter lower. The taxi driver offered us to get out if we didn’t want to fly, but we couldn’t miss such an extreme event, perhaps presenting itself once in a lifetime. Then he backed up a little, accelerated and, like a skier, rushed headlong into the abyss. For an instant, all four wheels were in the air.
“Almost every day someone dies on our roads, unless, of course, they get shot,” complained virtuoso taxi driver Anatoly Rybkin. “We have a lot of taxi drivers injured, all of them with experience, but still they either break their necks, or their legs and arms, and so on every year.
But entrepreneur Evgeniy Golovin does not give money for roads, because he believes that anyway they will not reach the roads themselves. In the meantime, according to city statistics, Evgeniy Nikolaevich’s main clients are young people, who are increasingly dying on deadly highways.
Many businessmen, looking at the income from a cemetery for people, think about how to organize this or a similar business. But organizing a cemetery for people in Russia is almost impossible, since the amount of land for cemeteries in our country is extremely limited. And so many people have the idea of organizing a cemetery for pets. But everything is not so simple here either!!! Looking ahead a little, I’ll honestly say that it is not possible to officially organize a cemetery for pets in Russia. We wrote about this in the article. But there is always a but!!!
In our country there is a cemetery for pets and more than one. All of them, as mentioned earlier, are illegal or gray. Partially in other articles we talked about how this is all organized, but now we would like to expand on this topic in more detail.
WE ARE TELLING THIS FOR PETS OWNERS SO THAT THEY WOULD BLINDLY DISBELIEVE THE OPHIRISTS...
So there are two schemes for organizing a cemetery for pets.
The first scheme is gray. According to this scheme, organizing a cemetery for animals is, in principle, legal, but deceptive for animal owners. So let’s say you buy or rent a plot of land that is geographically convenient for organizing a cemetery for animals. Next, you “invest” in the infrastructure of the cemetery, paths, fences, security, etc. But in your newly organized pet cemetery, you bury the ashes for the animals, both in the ground and in the columbarium. In this case, you, as the owner of the cemetery, are clear before the inspection authorities for the inappropriate use of the land plot. You will also be clean before the employees of the Center for Hygiene and Epidemiology (former SES) and before Rospotrebnadzor. The logic is simple, the ashes of animals are sterile and do not have a detrimental effect on environment(soil and groundwater). And if you organized only a columbarium, then there is nothing to show to you at all, since there is preservation of ashes, not burial. The only thing you need to do is pay taxes.
The downside for pet owners is that this plot is owned by one person or, even worse, it is rented. At any moment, this businessman can sell his plot for the construction of a garage or a house... And if in this scheme there is a risk that the plot on which the animal cemetery is located will be resold, then the second scheme is generally illegal.
The second scheme is dark. Let’s say there is a plot of land, often leased or self-occupied, which is tightly fenced off from prying eyes. And at this site, under a front company, the burial of domestic animals begins. Burial in an improvised cemetery for pets occurs before the first inspection from the above structures. Then this company disappears, and the true owners of the site on which the animal cemetery is organized demolishes it!!! The owners of buried pets will not be able to present anything to anyone, since they themselves broke the law. They buried the body of their pet (which is prohibited in Russia) on a plot of land whose owner did not give permission!!!
These are just two schemes that are most common in Moscow and the Moscow region. But we should not forget about the different interpretations and combinations of these schemes. Also, in any city in Russia there are “oval” illegal cemeteries for animals.
The Antimonopoly Agency proposes to make the market for funeral services competitive, moreover, to begin creating private graveyards as an alternative to prestigious state cemeteries, where the sale of plots has long been on stream.
All these proposals are contained in amendments to the law "On burial and funeral affairs"
Private cemetery of Baidagunov.
Director of LLC "Funeral Home "Requiem"" Rafael Latif ogly Baiduganov (for not the closest acquaintances Rafael Ivanovich) was born in Kirovabad, moved to Tolyatti in 1976, after the army, and until the early 90s worked at a factory - he did as and most of the city's residents, "Zhiguli". And then somehow he suddenly became an undertaker.
“I took up this business out of indignation,” he explains his extraordinary choice. “I saw what chaos was happening in the city: only one municipal funeral home, terrible wooden coffins, paper wreaths, satin fabrics...” He does not praise his goods worse than the master Bezenchuk from “The Twelve Chairs”: “We have only velvet on the coffins, decent wreaths, we organize funerals of the highest level.” High-level funerals in Tolyatti in the turbulent 90s turned out to be so in demand that by the mid-2000s, former worker Baiduganov was able to take his business to a fundamentally new level.
He became the first owner of a private cemetery in Russia. “Actually, this idea - to take a long-term lease of a cemetery - was not mine, but the administration’s. We have this Primorskoye cemetery, it was completely abandoned, and they began to pester me with requests: you, they say, are still nearby If you live, take it and put it in order." Baiduganov agreed. In 2005, he entered into an agreement with the local administration on the maintenance of the cemetery and the provision of funeral services for a period of 49 years, and since then, he says, he has already invested 29 million rubles in Primorskoye. “I just took out 220 cars of garbage, installed electricity, water, tiled the paths, built a chapel,” Baiduganov lists. Since the cemetery is in fact private, but formally municipal, he cannot sell the land for burial as such and continues to make money from providing funeral services (the average cost of a burial is 19-25 thousand rubles). There were even more plans: Baiduganov wanted to build the first crematorium in the region, but then the administration demanded that it be transferred to the ownership of the city, and the project did not take place.
“There is a lot to fight in this business,” Baiduganov complains. “I have been fighting against trafficking in dead bodies for many years - this is when doctors and police take bribes from funeral services and leak the necessary information to them.” Baiduganov himself does not need such methods of work thanks to the successful marketing move— the creation of a non-profit partnership “Unified City Ritual Information Center”, which, however, provides information specifically about the “Requiem” funeral home.
“For this, my competitors even attacked me once and beat me badly. There is a lot of crime in business, and the methods are appropriate,” says Baiduganov. He does not consider his business particularly profitable, believing that the money invested in Primorskoye will return to him only in ten years. Now, if the plots could be sold, then it would be a different matter. Nevertheless, the profit from this business has already allowed him to build another - a tile and brick production plant. Part of the tiles is used, again, for the arrangement of the graveyard.
Divide and bury
The Federal Antimonopoly Service (FAS) has been dreaming for many years to eradicate the evils of the funeral business, making this business more market-based and less state-owned. Among other innovations proposed by the department is the creation of private cemeteries. Amendments to the law with the gloomy title “On Burial and Funeral Business” were recently submitted to the government.
The entrepreneur Baiduganov was ahead of his time with his cemetery, and this, of course, has a deep philosophical meaning, which is what we are telling him about. Rafael Ivanovich promises to think about this at his leisure (while he was working on garbage and tiles, there was no time), but says that these amendments are “like a poultice for a dead person.” The FAS sees the main recipe for ridding the market of crime in the division of areas of activity between companies: some service cemeteries, others provide funeral services. But Baiduganov has everything together, and he doesn’t want to share it at all.
Officially, according to special government regulations, only outstanding citizens can be buried at Vagankovsky, but in fact, anyone can be buried for $150 thousand
Photo: Vasily Shaposhnikov, Kommersant
Obviously, other market players don’t want this either. The Moscow market, for example, since Luzhkov’s times has been moving precisely in the direction of merging the state with the existing very specific business. Former head of department consumer market and Moscow services, Vladimir Malyshkov told Dengi that it was thanks to the strengthening of the role of the state that crime was eradicated from cemeteries. This role was strengthened in the following way: two dozen funeral agencies were obliged to transfer blocking blocks of their shares to the State Unitary Enterprise Ritual, and this State Unitary Enterprise manages all cemeteries belonging to Moscow (59 of them inside the Moscow Ring Road, 12 outside), in addition, it owns crematoriums and workshops , own transport fleet.
“There is no more crime in this business,” says Malyshkov. “And what did they do before us? They sat in cemeteries... They identified where the graves were ownerless, where relatives were not caring for them, and resold these plots. We stopped all this, trained professional personnel "We are in complete control of the situation."
The current head of the State Unitary Enterprise Ritual, Egorov, assures that control has not become weaker since then: “Due to the density of burials in Moscow cemeteries, digging graves can only be entrusted to professionals: only State Unitary Enterprise employees do this. We have changed the approach to both people and working conditions - there is no longer a drunken navvy with a gold chain around his neck."
But no one really seems to believe in the victory won by the state over crime in cemeteries. Even the State Unitary Enterprise "Ritual", which was called upon to symbolize this victory, posted on its website an article by Archpriest Gennady Belovolov, which states that only the church can defeat crime in cemeteries. For a cemetery monopolist, a church is certainly preferable to a market, but the Moscow authorities seem to be gradually leaning towards the market.
Last week, the Moscow City Duma adopted a law obliging the State Unitary Enterprise Ritual to sell the shares of ritual companies obtained through Malyshkov’s efforts. Of course, such exotic innovations as private cemeteries are still a long way off, and there is not yet much interest from business in this topic. "Investment in the creation of a new cemetery in big city will amount to about 400 million rubles. And the return of money takes decades. Few people want to wait for it to pay off. Companies will skim off the cream and declare bankruptcy,” says Andrei Tsvetnov, director of the Corporation of Funeral Enterprise Managers. significant changes will still happen in the market. There is a high probability that, thanks to the initiatives of the FAS and the Moscow authorities, next year in Moscow the management of cemeteries and funeral services will be separated.
Zhirinovsky's grave
This is certainly a good thing for Muscovites. The shadow trade in land in cemeteries has grown to gigantic proportions in recent years. By expert assessments, annual turnover The market for funeral services in Moscow is 10 billion rubles, and market growth exceeds 10% per year, and not due to an increase in mortality (it is decreasing by a couple of percent per year), but due to increased prices. “We have everything turned upside down,” says the head of the control department social sphere and trade FAS Timofey Nizhegorodtsev. “All over the world, the main money in the funeral services market comes from the maintenance of graves, and in our case it comes from their sale.”
The official position boils down to the following: places in cemeteries are provided free of charge, but in reality burials are only possible in related graves after the sanitary period has expired (13.5 years). Free burials at at the moment, according to the information of the State Unitary Enterprise "Ritual", are possible only at one Perepechinsky cemetery (Solnechnogorsk district of the Moscow region) and generally impossible at Novodevichy and Vagankovsky (the ban is lifted for the burial of prominent people by special government orders). However, on the black market, anything is possible.
The creation of an SRO in the funeral services market should lead to a civilized market and a reduction in the number of its participants
The cost of the cheapest plots in regional cemeteries starts from 5-6 thousand rubles. (Novobogorodskoe cemetery, Noginsky district), and on Khovanskoye (1.5 km from the Moscow Ring Road) the plot is already sold for 150 thousand rubles. The most expensive ones are on Vagankovsky. The price of a grave here corresponds to the cost of an apartment - from $100-150 thousand for a plot closer to the fence. The purchase of plots occurs under the guise of payment for services. For example, State Duma Vice-Speaker Vladimir Zhirinovsky, as he himself claims, completely free of charge obtained a resolution from the Moscow government to allocate a plot of land at the Troyekurovskoye cemetery (“I really wanted to go to Novodevichye, but they didn’t allow it, apparently I don’t belong to the elite,” bitterly Zhirinovsky joked), but he officially paid 2 million rubles for the “services”. The grave was decorated with marble, and the vice speaker intends for now to rebury the remains of his father Wolf Eidelstein from a cemetery in Israel and his grandmother, buried in Kazakhstan.
“In the simplest cemeteries within the administrative borders of Moscow, the price starts from 700 thousand rubles, but they will write you a receipt, of course, for fifteen thousand. Everything will go to the black cash register,” one of the funeral agencies explained to Denga. For resale, the Moscow government and the State Unitary Enterprise "Ritual" came up with complex system euphemisms that quite officially allow one to bypass existing burial restrictions. The same "Ritual" does not sell land in the cemetery - it sells the arrangement of future graves: work on landscaping the burial site, installing a plinth, fencing, etc. "Our land is free, people buy services - drainage, cleaning, preparation for the installation of a monument" ,” Egorov clarifies the complex terminology.
Another official way to obtain a place in a Moscow cemetery is guardianship over an abandoned burial site. Such burials in old cemeteries range from 7% to 15%. New owner must restore the monument, and write on the back the name from the previous burial, so that relatives, if they suddenly show up, can find the grave.
Finally, the graves of relatives are sold. For this purpose, a completely legal mechanism has also been developed for transferring the right to lifelong lease or transferring the right of responsibility for the burial site - this is especially true for prestigious historical cemeteries in the center of Moscow.
You can't buy peace
While the market conceived by the FAS can theoretically correct the situation with the sale of places in cemeteries, the main problem—“trade in dead bodies”—seems to be impossible to solve with any amendments.
“Recently, a woman complained that in the first hour after her husband’s death, 15 agents called her. The calls began immediately after the ambulance doctor arrived and ended only when she turned off the phone,” says Alexey Suloev, deputy head of the department of consumer market and services of the Moscow government.
““Black agents” graze not only in morgues - financial relations connect them with the police, doctors, firefighters, and the average cost of each “drain” is estimated at about 10 thousand rubles. It happens that each of the departments involved in these relations lobby the interests of their agents: doctors in their own ways, the police in their own,” one of the market participants describes the mechanism for selling information.
"In addition to causing moral suffering to relatives commercial sale information from the Ministry of Internal Affairs, from the ambulance service - one of the reasons for the increase in the cost of funerals,” states general manager State Unitary Enterprise "Ritual" Alexander Egorov. According to Alexey Suloev, the price inflated by “black agents” is 200%, and they occupy up to 30% of the market.
However, the FAS still has hope that market mechanisms, although not completely and not completely, will correct this imbalance - mainly due to the emergence self-regulatory organizations(SRO). “To begin with, legislative requirements for participants in the funeral services market will be spelled out,” says Andrey Tsvetnov. “Each funeral agency must have a certain number of premises, transport, qualified personnel. Today there are many such players who deliver loaves to stores in the morning, then They carry the dead in transport, and draw up contracts on the windowsill. They will leave the market completely, of course, the system of selling information, but there will at least be fewer buyers.”
There will be no dependence on the authorities. Any person who becomes an entrepreneur is responsible to himself. You just have to think about what is the best thing to do.
Private cemeteries in world practice
On the one hand, the idea of creating a business to provide a final refuge is very logical. However world practice shows that the solution to this issue is ambiguous.
Even in the New World and Europe a hundred years ago, the existence of private cemeteries was common.
At present, such an idea is clearly not welcomed by the authorities. Why is this happening? The fact is that many years of experience in running such a business have shown that privatization inevitably entails many problems associated with landscaping, as well as the right of ownership of graves located on a given territory.
Private cemeteries in Russia
Currently, the places where the final resting places are located are under the authority of the municipality. How to open a private cemetery? Today in Russia such business is contrary to current legislation. However, the Antimonopoly Federal Service has already made a proposal to change regulations.
There is a possibility that amendments will be made to a number of legislative acts, and private graveyards will appear on the territory of the Russian Federation. It is assumed that land plots will be allocated for them, leased for forty-nine years. According to experts, this will reduce the cost of funeral procedures. Once the lease expires, the cemetery will not be demolished. The authorities will conclude a new agreement on the use of the land plot for another forty-nine years.
Burial of pets
How to open a private cemetery until amendments to existing legislation have been adopted? Currently, a business idea for burying pets is being implemented in Russia. This problem is relevant not only for city residents. It also worries the population of rural areas.
That's all today more people keep animals in city apartments. Pets often become practically members of the family. However, their life expectancy is much shorter than that of humans. The death of an animal turns out to be a tragic event for the owner. In addition, the burial of the animal becomes a big problem. It is impossible to do this within the city limits, and hardly anyone will dare to throw a dead pet into the trash.
Business idea
Currently, private cemeteries for pets exist near the capital. However, in the regions there is still plenty for such activities free niches. Using this idea will not be difficult. In this case, you can receive good dividends.
First steps
In order to organize your own business for burying pets, you will need to draw up a business plan for the cemetery. This document should develop basic provisions regarding the provision of such services. First of all, a cemetery business plan is a document in which it is necessary to reflect the criteria for selecting a land plot.
This should be an area located either within the city or on its outskirts, but away from residential buildings. This stage the most difficult one, because it is necessary to select a site that is not of particular value to the city authorities. After this, you will need to sign a lease agreement.
Landscaping
The business plan for the cemetery should include putting the leased plot in order. Landscaping will consist of marking the area for buildings. For advertising purposes, you will need to arrange four to five graves.
The cemetery where pets will be buried must have the following:
A wall for cremated pets, which will be a brick structure divided into square meters;
- “Walk of Fame” for especially distinguished animals, who during their lifetime were rescuers, circus performers, etc.;
- economy and VIP class areas for clients with different financial capabilities;
- a service center for those owners who want to order a coffin, photo medallion, cemetery monuments and other ritual accessories for their deceased pets.
Initial Investment
How to open a cemetery? You will need a certain amount initial capital. Cash investments needed to pay for the rented land. The amount of this amount directly depends on the region in which the private cemetery is located. There will also be costs associated with landscaping the area. Their size can range from one hundred fifty to three hundred thousand rubles. To promote your business you will need advertising (prepare about ten thousand rubles).
What documents will be needed?
A pet cemetery business plan should include all preparatory paperwork. A license to conduct this activity is not required. However, before starting work, it is necessary to conclude a number of agreements with environmental services, with sanitary and epidemiological supervision, as well as with the animal disease control station.
A deceased pet is subject to mandatory examination by a veterinarian. In addition, all services must be provided in compliance with existing anti-epizootic measures. Even transportation carried out in special vehicles requires special certificate number three.
A prerequisite for of this business is the daily disinfection of vehicles providing zoological services. Once a month, a specialist from the veterinary station should be invited. He will carry out a complete disinfection of vehicles.
List of services provided
Foreign experience shows that you can earn a good income by opening a pet ritual business. A pet sematary should make a good profit. Its specific dimensions will depend on the list of services provided. The main income of such cemeteries is generated from the amounts paid for rented cemetery space. A significant portion will be payment for the funeral services provided.
Cemetery prices in Moscow for one grave start from five thousand rubles per year. Owners whose pet's ashes are placed in the wall contribute a little less. The annual fee for a place is three thousand rubles. A grave located on the Walk of Fame is much more expensive. Here you will need to pay fifteen thousand rubles a year for one place.
If your company delivers animal corpses to a cemetery, you will need special transport equipped with a refrigeration chamber. The transportation fee will vary depending on the mileage.
You can build a building on the territory of the cemetery, equipping it with a cremation oven. If there is no financial opportunity, this can be done veterinary clinic, with which a corresponding agreement must be concluded. The cost of services provided by the crematorium will be about eight thousand rubles. This rate is set for individual burning of ashes.
The profitability of your business will depend on the range of services service center, which can produce monuments and portraits of their beloved pets upon owners’ orders.
It would be advisable to open an animal shelter not far from the cemetery. In it, the owners will be able to find a new friend. A veterinary hospital could also be built at the cemetery, which would provide services for euthanizing old and sick animals.
Now you can calculate the profitability of the pet ritual business. By renting burial sites, an amount from three hundred to five hundred thousand rubles per year will be received from every hundred clients. Providing funeral services will bring income from 0.5 to 1.5 million rubles. The services of the service center will allow you to charge clients from two hundred to seven hundred and fifty thousand rubles. Thus, annual income will range from 1 to 2.75 million rubles.
Cemetery business or investing in the afterlife
It seems to me or lately The topics of articles on a lazy blog have become too predictable?! I really wouldn't want a lazy blog to turn into a narrow one. thematic platform(about PAMM accounts, etc.). So today I propose to take a little break from financial markets and talk about one extremely unusual type of investment, which is thriving all over the world and gives very good profits. We are talking about investing in... cemeteries.
In our country, the problem of lack of space in cemeteries is especially relevant for Moscow, so I will examine the topic using the example of our capital. In a multimillion-dollar metropolis, 100-120 thousand people die annually and all of them need to be buried somewhere. However, new cemeteries are not being built in Moscow, and the old ones are overcrowded and officially closed. Most of the remains, of course, are burned, but at the same time, famous and rich people continue to be buried in Moscow. How does this happen?
How are they buried in Moscow?
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Let’s say one of the capital’s many businessmen’s relatives died, he must be buried properly and, of course, in Moscow. A businessman gets into his car and drives around all Moscow cemeteries in search of a suitable place. There are officially no vacancies, but the grief-stricken rich man is promised to “help solve the problem” for a certain amount. The cost of the so-called assistance ranges from 65 to 140 thousand euros and, depending on the amount, the place is located in any of the capital’s cemeteries. Not bad)
Where do these prices come from? It's very simple - it provokes a crazy price great demand. In Moscow alone there are more than a hundred billionaires, and several thousand millionaires. In addition, a lot of famous public people live in the capital, who are also buried in local cemeteries, some large companies They pay for the funerals of their leading specialists at corporate expense. Bandits are a separate story, they are buried at the expense of the common fund, because the amounts for good places There are quite a few offered at cemeteries.
You can find cheaper graves if you turn to private owners. On the Internet you can often find advertisements for the sale of plots in capital cemeteries. The cost of such proposals is an order of magnitude less than the amounts quoted by the cemetery administration. For 20 thousand euros you can find a grave even for tomorrow, and if we are talking about an advance purchase, then the price can become even lower. However, in such transactions there are certain risks of problems with the law.
The trends in the “cemetery business” are such that prices for burial sites are steadily and continuously increasing. Even during the world financial crisis the cost of cemetery plots showed an increase.
Investing in graves in Russia and abroad?
As a rule, all “organizers” of transactions on burial places insist on correctly executed documents and the complete legality of the purchase and sale. But in reality they are lying Russian legislation does not allow the sale of plots in cemeteries. In Europe and America, the situation is different: cemetery lands bring fabulous profits to their owners, since all transactions with them are permitted by law. These types of investments attract not only private investors, but also large investment funds, and the profitability of such investments is approximately 100%.
It must be said that population growth inevitably leads to an increase in the need for burial places. And given the fact that cemeteries within large cities are filling up very quickly, we can confidently predict a further increase in the profitability of such investments. In the USA and Great Britain, the payback period for investments in cemeteries ranges from 1 to 5 years (data taken from the Internet).
In Russia it is impossible to privatize a cemetery site. The activity of selling graves is officially considered illegal and is categorically discouraged by the authorities. Some cemeteries even post notices stating that any proposals for the sale of plots in the cemetery are a common scam, since there are simply physically no places in the capital’s cemeteries. All plots are included in the general cadastre and belong to municipal property. However, the Moscow Consumer Market Department provides information that every year 1,500–1,600 people find their final refuge in the capital’s overcrowded cemeteries.
Unfortunately, modern Russian legislation does not officially allow people to make money from speculation in graves. But unofficially, a number of people, from cemetery administrations to enterprising individuals, make good money from this business. Some private owners are even ready to dig up the remains of their relatives and move them to distant cemeteries near Moscow just to sell the grave profitably. Creepy.
Cemetery business and investments
In this article I have collected enough general information on investing in the cemetery business, which I managed to collect from various sources on the Internet. It is clear that for ethical reasons this type investment is suitable only for a few. But maybe that's why this method earnings and is so profitable for the people who engage in it.