New Yorker helps others find, sell final resting places

New Yorker helps others find, sell final resting places
QUEENS, NY — Ever wonder how people buy and sell cemetery plots? Jeff Solomons can help you out. In February 2025, Solomons launched his business, Cemetery Plot Listings, to help people find, buy and sell cemetery plots. He said his inspiration came from wanting to leave a business to his autistic son, who is getting ready to graduate college with a computer science degree.
“As a parent and (like) probably every parent, they always worry about their child’s future and with my son, he’s probably going to have extra challenges that the average person doesn’t,” Solomons said. “I spent many sleepless nights about this, and decided I would try to come up with some type of a business that I can get going and then pass off to him. Then, if things don’t work out, if his plans don’t go the way he plans, he’ll have a little something that generates an income.”
But why cemetery plots? Solomons said he is often thinking of things on the strange side.
“I like weird ideas. I don’t want to be the guy that sells another hamburger,” he said. “I found an article about people that had cemetery plots that they just didn’t have a need for anymore. A lot of people do buy plots, and then they either get divorced and they don’t want to be buried next to their now not-loved-one anymore, or they retire and they move to Florida and they’ve got a plot in New York that they just don’t have a need for.”

Other times, people inherit plots. Sometimes, people who bought plots will get cremated and pass the plot to whoever is next in their line. “And then those people are like, ‘what am I going to do with the plot? I don’t want a plot,’” Solomons said.
“Navigating it is hard. My mom passed away, now it’s 25 years (later) and it feels like yesterday. We always joked that she wanted to be cremated. She always said, ‘cremate me and spread me over Hawaii, it’s the only way I’m going to get there.’ And then she went into the hospital on Thursday and she was gone on Friday. And we never had a discussion, a real discussion, about what do we do, and we had to go through all the documents, there was no planning, no preparation. So we ended up burying her, and I just always wondered if that was a good decision or not.”
He’s not the first person to come up with the idea to sell cemetery plots, so he researched other sites doing the same thing and took their best traits to make his own using the developer of Swan Technologies. The site is https://cemeteryplotlistings.com. Currently, Solomons has about 140 clients.
“What sets us a little bit apart from other businesses is it’s a flat $49. We don’t take commission. We’re not looking to take advantage of people. We’re looking to help people out, and OK, we want to make a little bit of money of course. You’ve got to maintain the website and like I said, I’m trying to get some kind of a little income for my son.”
For $49, the listing runs for a year while Solomon and his team do the marketing and try to find a buyer for the plot. On the website, you can buy, sell or register as a merchant wanting to advertise. You can browse details of various cemeteries, as well as educate yourself on scams that could be afoot.
“As far as lots go we’ve got seven listings in New York, we’ve got four in Pennsylvania,” Solomons said. “We’re in 33 states and we’re growing all the time. Sometimes I’ll get an email from somebody who will find us on the internet and say, ‘I don’t see my state, do you not do Nebraska?’ or whatever state, and I’ll say ‘no, we’re in every state, you just plug in your state and it’ll populate. We just don’t have a lot of plots in that state yet.’”
But it’s somewhat of a tough business to break into. Finding a niche in the unique chain of post-life plans has brought some challenges.
“The funeral homes usually, from what I’m learning on this journey, are that they get their business through word of mouth,” Solomons said, “so, everybody knows the local funeral home in whatever, if you’re a small town or a bigger town, but funeral homes have not been, so far at least, a great avenue for us to go down.”
Reaching out to funeral planning outfits has been somewhat helpful, and Solomons said he reached out to church groups too.
“We do a lot of marketing for senior citizens,” he said, making more people aware of the site. “We also reach out to a lot of retired people and people who are relocating— If you relocate, not only do you probably need a new plot, but you probably need to get rid of your old plot if you’re out of state. So we’re trying to juggle it on both sides and it is a challenge. It’s not an easy gig selling plots, and I always tell any clients that come on board it’s not easy.”
The main challenge is finding buyers looking for plots. It’s a morbid question to ask, for one thing, “where do you want to go when you die?”
It’s no wonder it’s tough navigating the ecosystem of business when there’s more and more end-of-life trends happening, such as tree pods, cremation, getting turned into diamonds or cast in resin.
“We’ve also gotten down the road of hospice, you know, trying to reach out to people who are terminal, but how ghoulish do you sound reaching out to a hospice and saying, “hey, I know you got a lot of people there that probably don’t have a lot of time, maybe I can sell you a plot,’ that just sounds wrong,” Solomons said. “It makes you feel like the Grim Reaper a little bit.”
That’s not really his style of sales and marketing, though. End-of-life plans are just that, plans, and they do not have to be stressful.
“I’m just trying to help people that have something that they don’t need anymore, and I’m trying to find people that have a need for that item, and that’s all I want.”