Cannabis business hopefuls need to understand the challenges in entering the legal cannabis market, including real estate limitations and high initial investment, before diving in, a panel of experts explained during an NJBIZ Business of Cannabis panel on June 28.
The fiscal barrier to entry is wide-ranging. Higher Yields Consulting founder and CEO Cory Waggoner said he’d seen dispensaries built for $150,000 and at least one 25,000-square-foot dispensary built for $8.5 million.
“On the cultivation side, a rule of thumb that we’ve been using, and it continues to increase, is about $400 a square foot to build a building, build it out and then bring in all the equipment,” he said. “Extraction can kind of change, depending on what you’re trying to do. If you’re just going to use a hash press, you can pick those up for like $8,000, but if you’re doing cryoethanol extraction, you know you’re going to be in that half-a-million-dollar range depending on how much you want to process and how often you’re going to going to run the machine.”
Challenges with the construction industry are hitting new cannabis development, like the high price of steel and a long wait time—20 weeks—on custom cabinets.
To read the complete article, go to www.njbiz.com