Sell Your Land for More Cash

Why would a land buyer tell you about other ways to sell your land?

If you’ve decided to sell your land, we think you should be aware of and consider all of your options. Yes, we are in the land investment business and we hope you decide to sell your land to us. After years of experience, we have found that the more you know going into the sale, the happier you will be when it’s done. We prefer to build our business by providing value to landowners, not by keeping “secrets” and hoping you don’t find out. We’ve provided a more detailed explanation of why we wrote this document at the bottom of this page.

Questions to Ask Yourself

To determine the best way to sell your land, start by asking yourself some questions:

Because selling always takes some amount of work, have you considered all the other options for your land first? See our linked article, What Can You Do With Your Land? for information about other options you may not have thought about.

How interested in selling the land are you? Are you just curious about current pricing but not really interested in selling? Would you sell, but only at full retail price? Do you have a need for a specific amount you’re trying to get from the property? Do you just want it gone?

How much cash do you need from the sale? When do you need it? Do you need it all at once or could you accept payments over time?

How much work and initiative are you willing and able to put into the sale? Do you have contacts in the area where the land is located? Do you live in the area where the land is located? If not, are you able to find and interview Real Estate Agents and Title Agents remotely, or are you willing and able to travel to the area to accomplish those things in person? Do you have inheritance or tax issues that may complicate the sale?

How comfortable and confident are you at placing ads and dealing directly with buyers? How much skill do you have at Real Estate in general?

Everyone’s answers to these questions will be different. Keep your answers in mind as you read about the options below.

Ways to Sell Land

At a high level, the ways for individual landowners to sell their land are:

At full retail price, usually with the help of a Real Estate Agent
At discount retail price, also usually with a Real Estate Agent
At a price somewhere between wholesale and retail in a private party / person-to-person sale without using a Real Estate Agent
At wholesale price to an investor

If it’s really that simple, why doesn’t every land owner just sell their land at full retail? The reason is that as you go up from wholesale pricing to retail pricing, more and different work, initiative, waiting, and expenses will be required from you as the seller in order to be successful. Also, Real Estate Agents are trying to make a living like everyone else and land listings often do not pay them enough commission to make it worth much effort on their part. As a result, many land owners who try to sell land at retail price with a Real Estate Agent end up unsuccessful.

We cover the difference between wholesale and retail pricing extensively in our Land Pricing article. You may want to familiarize yourself with how land is priced while considering the options below.

Full Retail Sale

You could sell your land with the help of a Real Estate Agent and get at or near full retail price for it. Unless you are a Real Estate professional yourself, it’s unreasonable to expect to receive full retail price without hiring a Real Estate Agent. It’s also common for the buyer to be represented by a Real Estate Agent in a retail sale. This helps make the transaction smooth and professional.

Real Estate Agents can list the property on MLS from which it propagates to lots of web sites like Zillow, Redfin, Realtor.com, etc. That greatly increases your property’s exposure to potential buyers. Real Estate Agents can give you a good estimate of what “Full Retail Price” actually is for your specific piece of land. They have a local phone number and can also show the property in person which greatly increases buyer credibility. They usually have the documents you will need for a sale ready and available. They typically know the right professionals like title companies or real estate attorneys to complete the sale.

The Real Estate Agent will charge a commission for their services and you will typically be expected to pay part or perhaps all of the closing costs of the sale. Budget at least 10% of the expected sales price for commission + closing costs. It also helps greatly if you are willing to finance the sale yourself since banks rarely finance land purchases and lots of retail land buyers do not have all cash up front. Consider carefully if you are willing to accept payments over time rather than all cash up front, as accepting payments may net you a higher sale price than all cash. A Real Estate Agent can typically assist you with the details of seller financing if you are willing to do that, but you may also want to review the financing section of this page under Private Party Sale.

At Blue Light Land, we are not Real Estate Agents. But we very highly respect what they do and as we described above in the right circumstances, they can be extremely helpful to you as a seller. However, one problem we have seen landowners have with Real Estate Agents is that Real Estate Agents make so much more from a house in an area compared to land in the same area that sometimes they neglect their land listings. Consider whether your land is valuable enough that the potential commission to a Real Estate Agent would be large enough to hold their attention and fairly compensate them for all the work they must do.

If you choose to hire a Real Estate Agent, it’s important to choose one who has successful experience selling land in the area where your land is located. It’s also good if they have pre-existing contacts with land buyers like end users and developers. Questions to ask Real Estate Agents you are considering hiring:

How much of your business is land sales versus house sales?
How many land parcels have you sold in your career?
How many land parcels have you sold in the last year?
What research have you done or will you do to determine what my asking price should be?
What do you plan to do to market my land?
Of the vacant land listings you accept, what percentage of them are successfully sold?

We do know Real Estate Agents in some areas that we can refer landowners to. Please Contact Us if you’d like a referral to a Real Estate Agent.

Even if you hire a “full service” Real Estate Agent, you should also familiarize yourself with the buyer identification and advertising methods we cover in the Advertising section of this page under Private Party Sale. If the Real Estate Agent doesn’t do all of that for you (many do not or can not do them all), you should do them yourself if you want to maximize your chances of a successful sale.

You should not expect to sell quickly at full retail price. You might – it does happen. But it’s also very common for land parcels to sit for months or years before selling when the owner wants full retail. If you have chosen to sell at retail price, have patience and persistence.

You should know going in that some properties are very difficult or impossible to sell at what the owner thinks is full retail price. If yours doesn’t sell after several months or years of trying, this could be the case. Some reasons a property may fail to sell at full retail price:

There are few or no people interested in buying land in the area for their own actual use. Investors almost never pay retail price, and if investors are the only ones buying land in an area then you may have to wait for conditions to change before you can get retail price.
Property values in the area are falling, so the full retail price from previous comparable sales cannot be obtained now.
The property itself has a specific flaw or problem, like:
- No legal access (land-locked property)
- Regulatory or practical use restrictions (wetlands or flood zone, protected species, sloped)
- Undesirable size, shape, or proximity to busy roads or industrial activities
- Expensive and/or restrictive Association of Property Owners (HOA)
- Difficult physical access (no roads at all, or unmaintained / 4-wheel-drive roads)
- Inaccessible or non-existent utilities
- Prior failed tests or environmental studies

Discount Retail Sale

The procedure for a Discount Retail Sale is essentially the same as for a full retail sale, so be sure to read the section above before considering this option. Unless you are a Real Estate Agent yourself, you should hire a real estate agent even for a discount retail sale. The main difference is that after you identify what the land’s full retail price is with the help of your Real Estate Agent, you take 10% to 40% off that price in order to attract buyers and incentivize a quick sale.

If you are discounting the price for a quick sale, be sure to advertise it! Have your Real Estate Agent put the discount right in the listing. For example:

“Priced $10,000 below comparable properties because owner needs to sell quickly.”
“Motivated Seller – 30% below market value!”

If true, such statements are often quite effective at attracting a buyer for a quick sale. If a property is sellable at retail, selling at discount retail instead can often speed up the process a lot. Instead of waiting 6 months for a buyer, you may get one in days or only a month or two. The more important a quick sale is to you, the bigger the discount you should offer from retail price.

Private Party Sale

With a private party sale, neither the buyer nor the seller are usually Real Estate agents or investors themselves. And they don’t hire Real Estate agents to help them. Because of that, both the buyer and the seller are less familiar with the process of transferring Real Estate and are approximately equally responsible finding each other and doing the work to get the sale to completion. The sales process may be bumpier as both parties are learning as they go. This can be OK as long as you’re prepared for it and expecting it.

The problem for most regular people with private party land sales is they often don’t know much about:

Documents: Which documents to use to insure a legal and trouble-free transaction.
Financing: How to get and set up financing if the buyer doesn’t have cash (banks almost never lend on vacant land).
Closing: How to find and engage the right third parties like title companies or attorneys to complete the transaction.
Advertising: How sellers find buyers and vice-versa safely and effectively.

These problems are solvable and we want to give you as much help with these issues as we can. We saved the largest section, Advertising, for last. That’s because you’ll want to get all the other issues ironed out before you start advertising. Nothing is worse than finding an eager and ready buyer but then having no idea how to actually complete the sale.

Our ability to help with the problems of private land sales is limited by the fact that we are neither Real Estate Agents nor Lawyers, and we do not act in those roles. The information below is of a general, educational nature and should not be construed as legal or professional advice. Before taking any action, we strongly encourage you to consult with a licensed professional attorney, real estate agent, and/or title company in the state where your land is located if you need specific advice regarding your situation.

Documents

The main document you’ll need to get the sales process rolling is a Real Estate Sale Agreement. It may also be known as a Purchase Contract, a Purchase and Sale Agreement, or similar terms. This is the agreement between you as the seller and the buyer that specifies the terms of the sale including the price along with various dates and deadlines. The sale agreement doesn’t actually complete the sale – it just describes how the sale will occur. The sale agreement document can range from a single page to several pages.

You can find examples on the internet by searching with the name of the state your land is in plus one or more of the names for the agreement. For example:

“Arizona Real Estate Purchase Contract”
“Colorado Land Sale Agreement”

You can prepare this document yourself or you can have an attorney prepare it for you. Either way, you should have a written document that specifies the terms of the sale ready to go. You are encouraged to write a draft using the terms you want to sell under, then modify it as you negotiate with the buyer to find something that’s mutually agreeable.

Financing

Many land buyers do not have cash liquid and available to pay the full purchase price of land they want to buy. Banks almost never lend directly on vacant land. So if you want to broaden your potential market beyond just the few people who have the liquid cash readily available, it really helps if you offer to finance your buyers. This is called “seller financing”. It’s OK to charge higher interest than a bank would – 6% to 14% interest rates are common. You should also require at least 20% down payment from the buyer so they have enough “skin in the game” not to just walk away from the deal. Set your asking price high enough that you’re happy to finance, and then offer a discount for cash that lands at a price you’d also be happy with. That way you’re happy whether you get a cash buyer or someone who needs you to finance them.

When you finance your buyer, you don’t actually give them any money. What happens is, they give you the down payment (minus expenses of the sale), plus a document agreeing to pay the balance over time. That document is called a “note”, and is usually accompanied by other documents which allow you to take back the property if they fail to make the agreed upon payments. The people who help close the sale (see the Closing section below) can typically assist you in preparing the right documents for seller financing. Often, they will also “service” the note for a monthly fee – meaning they will collect the payments, send the necessary notices and tax documents to the buyer, etc. and then just send you your principle and interest payment every month. Unless you are a very knowledgeable real estate professional, we highly recommended you have your note professionally serviced by a licensed title company or note servicer rather than trying to do this yourself. If you’re directing the transaction, have the title agent or real estate attorney write the contract to say that the buyer pays the servicing fee. That way the cost of servicing doesn’t come out of the money you’re getting from the sale.

If you do finance your buyer then you can often sell the note to a note buyer for cash after your buyer has successfully made a few payments. You’ll take a discount off of the remaining balance, meaning that you won’t get the full balance owed. But selling the note gets you out of the deal in a relatively short period of time despite the fact that closing the sale required you to offer financing perhaps over many years. The amount of discount on the note depends on things like downpayment (more is better, 20% minimum), interest rate (higher is better of course), and payment history. If you do finance a buyer and want to sell the note Contact Us and we can refer you to a note buyer.

Closing

Different states handle Real Estate closings differently. One of the main differences is between states that use Title Companies for closings versus states that use Real Estate Attorneys for closings. The following page describes the difference in some detail, and includes a map of states to help you determine what type of closing may be required for your land: https://retipster.com/real-estate-closing-agents/

Once you determine the type of closing assistance you’ll need, you need to find a properly licensed individual or company to provide that service. It’s best to find someone located in the same county as the land. They are the most likely to be familiar with the documents and procedures unique to that location.

Search the internet for the county or a nearby city to where your land is located + “Title Company” or “Real Estate Attorney”. For example, search on:

“Apache County AZ Title Company”
“Jackson MS Real Estate Attorney”

Try to gather the names and contact information for at least 5 candidates. Then to narrow it down further, contact each of them and ask if they do private party land transactions in the value range of your property, and ask for an estimate of expenses. For example, ask:

“Do you handle transactions of vacant land where the owner doesn’t have a Real Estate Agent and the value of the property is around $20,000? What would your fees be for a transaction of that size”

You may find some companies are happy to help, whereas others are reluctant to do transactions with lower value properties or where the parties are not represented by Real Estate Agents. Also, title companies or real estate attorneys can get busy, and when they do they may delay or otherwise neglect their lower value transactions.

Ideally, you want at least a couple options to choose from when you actually find a buyer. Title companies have been known to decline a particular transaction when it actually crosses their desk and they start doing research – so it pays to have a backup already in mind.

Advertising

Once you have a sales agreement document, have decided what you are willing to do with regard to seller financing, and lined up a licensed closing agent, you are ready to actively look for and make an agreement with a buyer. We’ve further broken this section down into the following sub-sections:

Buyer Identification
Pricing
Ad Content
Ad Locations
Selling Process

Buyer Identification

Start by thinking about who the buyer(s) for your land might be. Are they:

Individuals who want to build a house right away or in a few years?
Professional developers who want to build one or more houses for resale?
A business who wants it for commercial purposes like warehouse, signage, truck depot, or storefront?
Someone who wants to use the land for recreation like camping, hunting, ATV/dirt bike riding, or similar activity?
A conservation organization who wants to protect it from development?
Someone who wants to live off-grid or prepare a “bug out” location to survive after a disaster?

Each of these potential land buyers has different methods and appeals that will be effective in reaching them. You must tailor your campaign to the type of buyer who would reasonably be interested in your specific property.

Also, not all buyers can or will pay the same price for a given piece of land. For example, an individual may be happy to build one house on a particular 5 acre parcel for privacy to raise their family. Whereas a developer might be happy to build 20 houses on that same parcel and sell them off to 20 different families. Both the individual and the developer are ready and eager potential buyers for this land. But the developer would almost certainly be willing to pay you much more for it than the individual. That’s because the developer will help 20 families have a place to live, and the profit from doing that is almost certainly more than the value of a home with extra privacy to just one family.

On the other hand, keep in mind that most 5 acre parcels are not suitable for developers to build 20 houses on! The land may be far from a center of shopping and employment that would entice 20 families to live there. Or it may be subject to zoning regulations that don’t allow 20 houses to be built. Or it may be hard to get utilities for 20 houses there. For any number of reasons, developers are way more picky about which land they’ll buy than individuals looking to build a single house.

As a seller, you want to target the buyer(s) with the “highest and best use” for your property. So if you have one of the 5 acre parcels that is suitable for developers to build 20 houses on, then developers are who you should advertise to. But if you have one of the much more common 5 acre parcels that is not suitable for developers to build 20 houses on, but is suitable to build one house on, then you should advertise to individuals looking to build one house.

Avoid a shotgun approach to buyer identification. Often people think something like, maybe a developer would want this land or maybe just a single home builder. So they attempt to advertise for both types of buyers and “see what happens.” This is bad because:

It dilutes your efforts
It makes your ads confusing
You may get an offer from a lower-value buyer before you get an offer from a higher-value buyer. The person who’ll pay you more is not necessarily the quickest to see your ads and respond.

If you really don’t know whether your property is suitable for a higher value buyer, target the higher value buyer exclusively at first. If you find either because of getting no interest or from hearing complaints by the high value type of buyer that your property is not suitable for them, then you can move on to targeting the lower value buyer exclusively.

Pricing

Once you’ve identified your ideal buyer, you’re ready to determine an asking price. Be sure to read our Pricing document to understand the price bracket you should be working in and how it relates to the land’s retail price.

Start by estimating the retail price of your lot to your ideal buyer. One way to estimate retail price is that people building a house will typically pay between 5% and 30% of a house’s cost for the land the house is built on. If there are $300,000 houses on quarter-acre lots in the area of your 5-acre parcel, you might figure the retail price of the parcel as follows.

Individual wanting to build a house – $300,000 X 30% (top of the range because 5 acres for 1 house is large for the area) = $90,000 retail price for the land.
Developer – 20 homes * $300,000 per home * 5% (because each home only gets ¼ acre and they’re in business to make a profit) = $300,000 retail price for the land.

Another way to estimate retail price is to look at what similar parcels listed by realtors in the area have sold for recently. Find your property on a web site like Zillow.com. Ignore the “zestimate” for the moment (it can be quite misleading for land). Instead, select “Sold” from the drop down that lets you select sold, for sale, or for rent. Select “Lots/Land” from the home type drop down. Under the More drop down, scroll to the bottom and select 36 months from the “Sold in last” drop down. Finally, zoom out a bit and start looking at the sold properties on the right. You want to look for properties of about the same size, dimensions, road access, and other amenities as your lot.

The comparable sales method can be difficult if there are few or no similar properties. You can use properties of different size if you calculate a price per acre and then adjust accordingly. However this only works for a limited range. The price per acre on 1 acre parcels is usually a lot different from the price per acre on 40 acre parcels. But if they’re relatively close you can do it. Say you have a 5 acre parcel and you find a 3 acre parcel, a 6 acre parcel, and a 7 acre parcel that are otherwise comparable. You can calculate the price per acre of the other parcels and then multiply by 5 acres to get a price for your parcel.

You can also look at the county assessed value. Beware, though, this may have little relation to the retail price of the lot. As a result the county value should be considered a last resort when you are unable to determine the value as either a percentage of house values (no houses in the area) or comparable sales (no recent comparable sales).

Once you have a retail price for your parcel in mind, then determine your asking price based on the price bracket you’re working in. Remember this is determined by how much work you’re doing for your buyer vs. how much they have to do for themselves.

If you’re hiring a Real Estate Agent, advertising aggressively, waiting for the ideal buyer to come along, and offering seller financing, then ask for the full retail price.
If you’re hiring a Real Estate Agent but want a quick sale, or not offering financing, etc. then ask 10% – 40% less than the retail price.
If you’re not hiring a Real Estate Agent, ask something in the private party price bracket. You can ask close to retail price if you’re offering financing and you’ve lined up documents and a title company or real estate attorney to close the transaction so your buyer doesn’t have to do much. Ask towards the bottom of the private party bracket if you’re not offering financing and hoping the buyer will be able to handle some or all of the logistics of the sale.

Ad Content

Once you have an asking price, you’re ready to build the content of your advertising. We’ll cover where you can post your ads in the next section, and not all locations will allow you to post all types of content. Build one really comprehensive ad with all the content in a local file like a Microsoft Word document. That way you can put the pieces of it that are allowed on each advertising location. This is better than having a different version of your ad for each advertising location.

Start by capturing your buyer’s attention with an eye-catching photo of something related to the land. It doesn’t have to be (and often isn’t) a picture of the land itself, but something in the area.

Target the bulk of your advertising content to the specific interests and needs of your ideal buyer.

For example if your ideal buyer is a developer, talk about things like:

If the land is approved to be split into smaller lots, or if similar properties nearby have already been.
Sources of jobs and other economic activity in the area that would entice people to move there.
How quick / convenient it is to access from local major roads.
Ease of getting utilities in the area.
If the property is flat / graded and suitable for building on most or all of the land

If your ideal buyer is an individual wanting to build a house, talk about things like:

The privacy of a large lot if your property is large
Other homes in the area
Utility hookups already on the property or in the area
A home site on the property that is suitable for building

If your ideal buyer is someone wanting to camp, hunt, fish, etc. on the land but not live there, then talk about things like:

Natural beauty of the area
Seclusion / isolation from others
Distance to a major city or town where they might actually live

Also, be sure to advertise not only the land itself. Pictures of dirt or trees will rarely attract a buyer. You need to explain clearly to your buyer with both your words and your pictures:

What they can do on this land
What they can do in the area

Talk about local attractions, events, and things they can do within a reasonable drive. Paint the picture in your buyer’s mind so they have a reason to actually want your land.

Show the buyer where the land is and how to find it. You can do this by capturing screens from map sites, county databases, or real estate sites like Zillow. The procedure to do this will be different for every location. Here is an example for how to find a property without an address based on county map data in Cochise County, Arizona:

1) Go to the Cochise County web site here – https://parcelinquirytreasurer.cochise.az.gov/
2) Search by your APN (parcel number). Validate that the “Current Owner Name & Mailing Address” matches what you’re expecting for the property.
3) Click “View Parcel Map” on the left menu.
4) Click “-“ to zoom out until you can see another parcel with a red dot – those have an actual house (and therefore an address). Note where that property is in relation to yours.
5) Click on the parcel with the red dot.
6) Click “Zoom To” in the box that pops up, then read the address.
7) Click “-“ to zoom back out repeatedly to see major roads / context so you’ll know where you’re at in Google Maps (to be sure you got the right one – you should recognize the shape of roads etc matching the county parcel map).
8) Go to Google Maps or Google Earth and enter the address you found. There may be several possible cities so you may need to try more than one. It may also offer “Cochise, AZ” and that works too.
9) Note where the addressed property is relative to yours on Google Maps / Earth. Click on about the right map location and zoom in (there’s a bit of judgment here as the property boundaries aren’t marked).

Feel free to Contact Us if you need help locating your property on a map.

Finally, show your buyer why your land is a good deal, using the information you found in the “Pricing” section above. If you’re asking full retail price, show house values and explain how they can build a house worth more than the cost of the land + cost of construction. If you’re asking discount retail price or a private party price, show the comparable sales in the area – by price, and/or price per acre on larger lots. It should be clear to your buyer in that case that they’re getting a sizable discount.

Don’t forget, if you’re willing and able to finance the buyer say so! That’s part of what makes it a good deal. Advertise the down payment and an estimate of the monthly payment. Advertising that financing is available gives your property a huge leg up over the competition. The acronym “OWC” means “Owner Will Carry” and is a short way to communicate that you are willing to finance your buyer. Some example headlines if you’re willing to finance:

40% Below Market / $35,000 cash or OWC with $7,000 down payment!
Seller Financing Available, payments as low as $250 per month

You can use a mortgage calculator site to estimate the payment amount for a given amount financed and interest rate. Just search on “mortgage calculator” to find a site.

Ad Locations

There are many places and ways to advertise land for sale. Some of them are free; others have a cost. Some are easy and some are hard. Different ones are better for different types of properties and different types of buyers. The list below is intended to give you ideas to investigate; you’ll need to determine the right places to advertise your specific property.

Craigslist – Post the property on Craigslist for the city nearest the property and/or the city where your ideal buyer is located. Post your ad in the Real Estate For Sale category. As with signs, having a local phone number in the listing helps. Hiring a Real Estate Agent doesn’t make Craigslist posts happen for you unless the Real Estate Agent does it him/her self which isn’t common. So you probably need to do it yourself even if you hire a Real Estate Agent.

General Real Estate Web Sites – If you hire a Real Estate Agent, their MLS entry will probably automatically replicate the ad to tons of general real estate web sites like Zillow, Redfin, and Realtor.com. If you’ve decided not to hire a Real Estate Agent, you can post the property yourself as For Sale By Owner on Zillow (https://www.zillow.com/). You can also post it yourself on other general Real Estate web sites (with the exception of Realtor.com) but in our experience Zillow is the only one that reliably produces buyer leads.

Facebook Marketplace – You can post the property https://www.facebook.com/marketplace/. Like Craigslist, hiring a Real Estate Agent doesn’t make this happen for you and the Real Estate Agent can’t even do it for you so you have to do it yourself. Facebook Marketplace is normally one of the best places to sell vacant land. It attracts mostly recreational land users and people who want to build their own house, so generally not the best place to advertise if your ideal buyer is a developer or other commercial entity. Still worth a try though, and it’s free.

Land Specifc Web Sites – These are less well known than the general real estate sites, but can be more effective for land. Hiring a Real Estate Agent will likely not make this happen on its own, so if you’re going to try this you’ll probably need to do it yourself. Sites to consider posting your land on include:

Landwatch.com
Land.com
Landspree.com

Although many of these seem to be owned by the same parent organization.

Neighbor Letters – This one is commonly overlooked and is only done by some Real Estate Agents, but can be very effective. Write letters to nearby land owners that may want to expand their own property or bring friends or family to live nearby. You can find the names and addresses of neighbors at the county web site. For example, here’s how to do it for property in Pima County Arizona:

– Go to: https://www.asr.pima.gov/
– Search for your APN (parcel number)
– Click the “Globe” Icon under Mapping to open PimaMaps at your parcel
– Once it opens, zoom out by clicking on “-“ 2-4 times
– Click on nearby parcels, click “More Information” and a new page will open with the mail name and address of the owner

It’s important to state a reason for writing the neighbors. One of the best is to offer them a small discount off asking price because they’re a neighbor.

Direct Business Mail – If your ideal buyer is in a certain type of business, write directly to those types of businesses in the area. You can write letters, emails, or make phone calls to developers or construction companies. Use an internet search engine with the type of business and the county or city your land is located in. For example, “Construction Companies in La Plata County Colorado”.

Offer the companies you find a small discount off asking price because they’re an industry professional (or whatever other reason sounds good to you – you just need *a* reason for writing, not any particular one).

Signs – Even if you’re remote from the property, you can use Fiverr (https://www.fiverr.com/) to hire someone to put up “For Sale” signs on the property boundary along or perpendicular to the road the property is on. If at all possible, put a local phone number on the signs. If not using a Real Estate Agent, you can get a prepaid cellular plan yourself and sign up for a local number, then just stop the service when the property sells. Many modern phones (including recent iPhones) can have two numbers in the same phone (the second is called eSIM).

Note that “home made” signs (large hand written phone number on a pre-printed land for sale sign) will often work better than the hanging signs used by Real Estate Agents. The reason is they’re easy to read when driving by whereas most Real Estate Agent signs are designed to get you to stop (which most people won’t). The signs we use are available on Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/Large-Outdoor-Land-Ground-Stake/dp/B07NPWDSLX

Selling Process

If you’ve identified the right buyer, priced the property right, built compelling ad content, and posted it in the right places you should begin to get some phone calls or inquiries about your property.

Follow up on the inquiries! Don’t be a pest, but keep responding to the person, asking if they have questions, when would they like to see the property, etc. until they say they want to buy, or say they don’t want to buy/aren’t interested, or ask you to stop communicating with them (then, of course, do as they request).

If you’re not getting inquiries, determine how long to wait before trying something different. This will vary by property type and asking price. If you’re asking full retail, be prepared to wait for months before giving up on a particular strategy. If you’re asking a discount retail or private party price, you should change something if you’re not getting inquiries in a few days to a month. Work in the reverse of the build process for things to try changing. In other words, try changing things in this order:

Where you’re advertising
The content of your ad
The price you’re asking for the property
The type of buyer you’re targeting

Once you get a contact from a buyer who is ready and able to buy, get them to sign the sales agreement you’ve hopefully prepared in advance. Schedule closing for 30 to 45 days out. Once both you and the buyer sign the sales agreement, make a copy for them and another copy for the Title Company or Real Estate Attorney who will be closing the transaction. If you’ve hired a Real Estate Agent, your agent should take care of all that.

The Title Company or Real Estate Attorney should manage the transaction from this point. Unfortunately, sometimes they don’t do what they’re supposed to. It’s important to be sure they don’t drop the ball but contacting them regularly for updates – at least once a week. Ask them what they are waiting on and if they still expect the closing to happen on time. If they need something from you, give it to them ASAP. If they need something from the buyer, contact the buyer and ask the buyer to provide it.

If you provided seller financing to the buyer and later want to sell the note rather than collect payments over years, Contact Us and we can refer you to a note buyer.

Wholesale Sale

You probably found this page as a result of a web search or receiving a letter from us offering you a wholesale or investor sale. We do buy at wholesale pricing levels, but in return for the discount we work very hard to make the process as easy as possible for land sellers:

We buy when sellers are ready to sell. Sometimes this is months or years after our initial contact.
We answer questions and address concerns sellers may have.
We work to resolve ownership, zoning, access, topography, and tax issues.
We commonly buy land sight unseen, without performing percolation tests or environmental studies.
We engage all the needed third parties to complete the transaction and manage them as necessary to get the sale done.
We pay cash.
We pay all closing costs and fees, all pro-rated taxes and assessments, and back taxes if there are any. For many, the alternative is losing the property to a property tax lien or sale.
We relieve sellers of the need to pay Real Estate Agent commissions or advertising fees, take calls from buyers, travel to where the property is located to show it or close the transaction, etc.

If you’d like an offer on your land, simply go to our offer request page and fill out the requested information. Be sure to let us know if you’re interested in donating some or all of the proceeds of the sale to charity. See our article on What Can You Do With Your Land? for more information on charitable donations.

A further consideration for both the wholesale option and the charitable donation option: Depending on the price you originally paid for the land, the property taxes you’ve paid while you have owned it, and your other personal tax circumstances you may also be able to receive additional funds in the way of a capital loss and/or charitable deduction on your income tax return. Please ask your accountant or tax preparer for more information.

If you have received one of our letters, you probably know there are others in the wholesale/retail land business. You may have received letters from some of them too. They’ll probably be happy (as we are) to send you an offer on your property so you can compare it to ours. I’d expect the offer amounts to be broadly similar but it doesn’t hurt to compare.

However one important difference to be aware of when comparing investors is whether the deal is or may be a “double close”. What “double close” means is usually a 4-6 month purchase contracts and then not closing the purchase until a retail buyer is found. When the retail buyer is found, the investor then closes both transactions at the same time – hence the “double close”.

If you see an on or before close date 4-6 months out, that’s probably what is intended.

Double closing is riskier for you as a seller if you need your money quickly, because if the investor doesn’t find a buyer they don’t close, and you’re still left holding the land. And it can result in more hassle for you if the retail buyer asks for tests or studies on the land before purchasing. Plus even if the “double close” works, you have to wait longer to get paid because you’re waiting while the investor markets and negotiates with a retail buyer.

Because of these factors, any investor who is double closing is offering you less of a service than a shorter / single close and therefore should be offering you a higher price for your land. If you need your money quickly, be sure to let us know and we will be happy to write a “single close” offer for most property types.

However, if we offered you a shorter / single close and you actually want us to offer you a higher price assuming we will “double close”, please ask us for a double close offer as we can do that too.

Why we wrote this document

We send out letters based on public land ownership records and also receive seller leads from the internet. Neither of these sources tell us what your personal priorities are. Our business was built serving the landowners who are ready for a cash sale that’s as easy and hassle-free as possible. But there are landowners in other situations with other priorities who want to sell their land too. We wrote this page because:

We want both to help educate people considering selling us land and to help broaden the overall market for land. Nobody benefits from paying property taxes year after year on land they’re not using and have no plans for. We want to help eliminate that situation whether you sell to us or not.
You might not want to sell us the land we sent you a letter about. But you might also own land in another state you do want to sell us, or you might have friends or family with land they might want to sell to us, or your priorities might change in the future. We want to be at the top of your mind whenever and wherever you have land you want to sell quickly and easily.
We have received tremendous benefit from free internet resources, and this is one way for us to “pay it forward”.
We think options like charitable donation of land are not well known or well utilized by landowners. We hope that if you consider donating all or part of the proceeds of your land’s sale to charity, you will investigate and consider the SENS Research Foundation. SENS has no connection with our business and we receive nothing from them. We just think that the work they do is incredibly important, and they deserve far more attention than they currently get.

How ever you decide to sell your land, we hope this document has been helpful to you. Feel free to contact us if you have questions, comments, or there’s some way we can help. If you’re looking for a fast, easy sale please.