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Pinelawn Cemetery
Pinelawn Cemetery sells burial plots, mausoleum spaces, and funeral services to families on Long Island, New York.
Pinelawn Cemetery is a burial ground, not a typical business. It owns hundreds of acres of land in Farmingdale, New York, on Long Island, and it sells families the right to bury their loved ones there. Most of its money comes from selling plots and spaces inside its mausoleums, where bodies are interred above ground in stone buildings rather than in the earth.
The cemetery also sells the services that go around a burial: opening and closing graves, setting headstones, and arranging funerals and cremations. Families choose a cemetery like Pinelawn for the same reasons they choose any resting place — location, appearance, religious tradition, and reputation. Once a family buys a plot, they tend to come back to the same grounds for decades, and the cemetery keeps earning fees for burials and maintenance.
What makes this company unusual is that it is one of the very few cemeteries with shares that trade on a public market. It is listed on the OTC Pink marketplace, a lightly regulated corner of the stock market where small and thinly traded companies change hands, so its stock trades rarely and carries real risk for anyone who buys it. The business itself is steady and quiet, tied to the simple fact that every community eventually needs a place to bury its dead.
Saved answer · last researched 9 Nov 2026
BIG PICTURE
This cemetery company pays out 7.9% a year, more than most big-name stocks
- 7.9% Annual dividend yield paid to shareholders
- 92.1% Company earnings kept or reinvested
Pinelawn runs a cemetery and memorial park on Long Island, selling burial plots, mausoleum spaces and cremation services. Its dividend yield of 7.9% means a shareholder collecting $10,000 a year in payouts would need roughly $126,600 of stock. For a small, quiet cemetery business, handing back that much cash each year says a lot about how steady its plot sales and upkeep fees are. Source: Simply Wall St, data from 2026
Timeline
A Promise to Make a Beautiful Cemetery
In 1902, William H. Locke founded Pinelawn as a non-sectarian cemetery in Farmingdale, New York. He wrote out a simple pledge he called "The Promise of Pinelawn": the grounds would always be kept as beautiful and tasteful as possible. That promise, made before there was much to show for it, would quietly guide everything the cemetery did for the next century.
The Cemetery Goes Public
Nearly a century after it opened, Pinelawn did something unusual for a cemetery: it went public. Its purchase money certificates began trading on the OTC market that September. The move gave the cemetery's land-purchase interests a public market, even though the cemetery itself stayed in the hands of the Locke family nonprofit.
A Small Company Sitting on a Lot of Land
By early 2022, those public certificates carried a market value of about $67 million, roughly $525 apiece. The certificates work like a claim on the business: holders get half the gross proceeds whenever a lot is sold. Measured against the land still left to develop, that worked out to around $450,000 per acre — a hint that the quiet cemetery was sitting on something far bigger than graveyards.
A Small Project With a Big Payoff
In 2024, Pinelawn added 1,620 new lawn crypts in one section of the grounds, at a cost of about $1.4 million. The point was inventory: with more than 4,000 burials a year, the cemetery needed a few years of plots ready to sell. The math was striking — the project was expected to bring in around $15.6 million and pay for itself in under a year.
A Plan to Lease 100 Acres
That same year, Pinelawn applied to lease about 100 acres of its land to Bristol Suffolk, LLC, which wanted to build nine buildings there. The request set off a full environmental review, with the Town of Babylon in charge. For a place built around gardens and quiet, this was a major question: what would all that land eventually become?
The World's First Certified Audubon Sanctuary
Then in 2025 came the answer to what Pinelawn had really been building all along. It became the first cemetery in the world to earn "Certified Audubon Classic Sanctuary" status from Audubon International, thanks to water recycling, new wildlife habitat, and less chemical use. Suffolk County even proclaimed a day in its honor. More than a century after Locke's promise, the cemetery had become something he might have recognized: a garden first, and a cemetery second.