Transcription
Here's a 5-acre lot for sale in Crockett, Texas, listed at $79,500. And here is a property that is 6.95 acres. It's a vacant lot in Kings Mountain, North Carolina, that's listed for sale at $175,000.
Now, you can buy either one of these properties, and probably for a lot less than they're asking, by the way. But even though you can buy both of these properties, only one can actually be sold. See, the reason why the only one of the properties can be sold has very little to do with the inherent characteristics of the property itself, and everything to do with the local market where the property's located. Let's take a look at these two properties, and I'm going to show you what I mean.
Let's first take a look at the property in Kings Mountain, North Carolina. This is a piece of land listed at 142 Faun Lane. This is a 6.95 acre wooded home site accessible via a private dirt road. It's located in a quiet subdivision, good property values around you. In fact, the Land Portal AI price estimate puts the value of this land at $106,819. And they have comparable sales of similar lots that sold nearby, anywhere from $77,000 to $120,000. When you look at the environmental filters on the Land Portal, you find out that there's no wetlands, there's no flood plain, and there's very flat topography on this property. Looks like a piece of land that's very well suited to have a future home site.
Now, to understand the supply and demand for this property, let's take a look at the supply and demand metrics by going on Zillow and just looking at the public listing data that they show. This is a property that would be bracketed in 5 to 10 acres. And so, if you look at the 5 to 10 acre lots for sale in this market right now, there are 14 similar listings. But when you actually look in the last 12 months, and you see how many of those 5 to 10 acre lots have sold in the last 12 months, you are looking at 80 sales. When you have 80 similar properties that sold in a 12-month period, yet only 14 properties listed for sale right now, that means that if you divide the 14 current listings divided by the 80 that are likely to sell in the next 12 months, what you find out is that the 14 listings right now represent 0.175 years of inventory. You multiply that by 12 to convert years to months, and we're talking about a market with 2.1 months of inventory of similar property with similar acreage in this market. What that means in English is that a property that is 5 to 10 acres in this location that is priced competitively is going to be sold on average about 63 days on market. That's 2.1 months. What you can see is that for a market to move that quickly for vacant land, it's a very healthy market. And in fact, when you go into the sold data, what you find out is there's a lot of similar land that sold for $90,000 and up. And so, not only do we have a property that can sell reasonably quickly, but we have a pretty high level of certainty based on the sold data what that land is likely to sell for. In this market, there are 80 buyers, but only 14 sellers. What that means is that it's better to be a seller than to be a buyer, because the sellers have the juice. The sellers have the pricing power. They have the thing that is more limited. And the market is poised for long-term appreciation, because the fewer listings there are for any number of buyers, the more buyers have to pay up if they want to induce a seller to part ways with their land. This what's called a seller's market. In a seller's market, you have fewer listings, and you have more buyers. Buyers have to bring more competitive offers, and buyers have to make more offers to actually find the motivated sellers that exist in these markets. Sellers are going to want to get paid 100% cash at closing. They're not going to want to wait to get paid. They may not be interested in owner finance, because they may not need to extend owner finance to a buyer to get that property sold. Because once you own property in a market like this, if you price it right, statistically, on average, you can get your money out on a 63 days notice anytime you want.
Now, let's take a look at Crockett, Texas, and the property that we have listed for sale at 5 acres for $79,500 bucks. This is a large open cleared building site, and the AI land value estimate on the Land Portal shows an estimated value of $65,031. When you look at the environmental maps on this property, you do have a small speck of flood zone that crosses into the interior of our property, but it's a it's such a small amount of flood zone, it doesn't even cut in past the building setback. So, practically speaking, it's not going to constrain your site plan. There's really nothing to worry about here. You also have no wetlands, and you have a flat terrain, flat topography, which makes building a lot easier.
Now, to understand the supply and demand of the surrounding marketplace in Houston County, Texas, let's take a look on Zillow. Now, we're going to look at the 5 to 10 acre lots currently for sale on the market, and what you find is that there's 102 active listings. Now, is that a lot? Is that a little? I don't really know. That doesn't really give me a lot of insight on its own. But when you turn the page, and you see the number of similar land, 5 to 10 acres in size, that sold in the last 12 months, there's only 12 sales. So, when you look at the 12 lots that are going to sell in the next 12 months, as estimated by the 12 lots that sold in the last 12 months, the fact that there's 102 active listings means that when you divide 102 divided by 12, you have 8.5 years of inventory. That's 102 months of inventory. What that means is that there is such anemic demand. There are so few buyers relative to the number of sellers that similar property priced appropriately may still take 8.5 years to sell. See you in 2034. It'll be awesome. Yeah, we can break out the champagne in the hot tub around the holidays in Q4 2024, when in 8 and 1/2 years from today, that land will actually be sold. And you can even see it, guys, when you look at the views and saves metrics on the listing on Zillow. Look at this. You have this property, 124 days on market, 30 views, three saves. That's not good. That's not good. That's not good at all. That's bad. Especially when you consider the fact that this is one of the lowest priced listings in the county, and no one's even clicking on the page.
Guys, this is what you call a buyer's market. The reason it's a buyer's market is that there's way more listings than there are buyers. The sellers have no leverage whatsoever. The buyers have all the cards. So, in fact, buyers, when they start making offers, they're going to find out that a lot of these sellers are flexible on price. Buyers need to make far fewer offers in Crockett, Texas, to find sellers that are motivated to sell their land at massive discounts. And buyers need to offer less than they think, because even these listings that are priced at the low end of the market, they're still not getting clicks, they're still not getting views, and they're certainly not getting offers. See, motivated sellers, they may not need to get paid 100% cash at closing. In fact, they're much more likely to give you seller finance on a 10, 15, 20, 25% down payment with the balance paid out on a monthly basis over the course of several years. Why? Because that's what they need to do to actually get the property sold, to get the property moved. And once you own a property in a market like this, heaven forbid you have to sell it. If you're talking to a buyer, you want to turn over every stone before you let that buyer walk away, because if they do, that may be the last potential buyer that gets to talk to you for the next 6 to 12 months. So, if you want to sell that land at all, then you got to move your hips a little bit. You got to dance the dance with that buyer. You got to entertain them, and you got to make something happen, because if you don't, you're not going to have a lot of opportunities for a number of months in the future. And looking at some of the sold data, and looking at some of the listings that have sold in this county, gives you a clue as to how slow this market really is. Because when you look, there's only 12 properties that have sold in the last 12 months. And so, just looking at this 6.75 acre property, this may be the best 5 to 10 acre home site that sold in this acreage range in the last 12 months where the data is recorded. Why is this the best property? Well, look at look at it. You have a large open field. You have direct drive-up road access to a paved paved county road. The property's so flat, it's like a putting green. You could play ping pong or pool. You could basically put a putting green, a chip and putt out there, and you have like a manicured golf course, practically. It's so flat. And you have a natural water feature. You got a pond next to what will probably be the perfect location for a future home site. This is a premium property in every way that you would define that term for a property in this market of this acreage. And yet, it came to market in September 2023, listed at $97,000, and it sold in April 2025, a year and a half later. Guys, this is 18 months on market, and it took a year and a half to sell. And yet, this is the valedictorian of the class. This property is a shining star. This is like a standout example of a successful sale in a market where very few sales are being done, and it shows you even in non-disclosure states like Texas, where you can't get the actual sold price of the land and the real estate that sells, you can still get a lot of insight into market prices. How? Well, take a look again, guys. This was the best rural home site in the 5-to-10-acre range, and it was listed at $97,500 for a year and a half before it sold. And what that means is that the buyers that were in the market all saw the fact that this property had a for sale sign for over a year at a $97,000 price point, and nobody got off at got out of their chair to actually go out and make an offer. So, the buyers were sitting back looking at this property listed at $97,000 that wasn't moving. So, when it finally got under contract and someone actually put in a uh a cash offer price to buy that land, do you think that it sold at full price? Probably not. So, I would take at least 10% off the asking price, and I would speculate that it sold around $85,000. Why? Well, again, guys, it was listed for a year and a half at $97.5 before it sold, and in the same market where that land sold, you have property, good property, listed at $70,000, $75,000, $80,000 dollars, and no one's even clicking the page on Zillow. And what that means, guys, is if you made the mistake of buying this rural home site that may well be a great property. In fact, if you put this this property in so many other markets, it would sell at such a higher price so much more quickly. But if you made the mistake of thinking you got a good deal buying this thing at $79,500, and your plans changed, and you had to sell that property, well, you might have to dump that land at $50,000 bucks, and lose $30K in the process. And the punchline is that you may have to wait 12 months or more to even do that. Never buy land in dead markets if you ever plan to sell it because regardless of whether you're buying that land for personal use or for investment, the value of that land is equivalent to what a market buyer is actually willing to pay you. And if there's only 12 market buyers in the course of a year in that local county when there's over 100 sellers, the only way that you can sell that land is if you mark the price down so low that that listing jumps to the top of the pile because you have to cut price aggressively to induce a market buyer to part ways with their money and to put that property and that listing ahead of the 100-plus other listings that are in the market. And if you don't do that, it's going to take years and years to sell it if you can sell it at all.
By the way, guys, if you're buying land and you need a proven checklist uh for due diligence, go ahead and click the link below and download the free due diligence checklist, absolutely free. QR code on the side of the screen and the link in the description below as well.
Now, I want to give you guys a lens into how to evaluate markets. How to evaluate which markets across the US are healthy, which ones are sluggish, and how to pull marketplace data in a highly summarized way for every county in the US. The way that we're going to do that is via the Land Portal. Guys, the Land Portal is the most powerful land mapping and land and real estate data software that you're going to find on the market today. And if you want a 7-day free trial of the Land Portal, I'm going to put a QR code on the side of the screen right here, and then a link below, and you can try it out free for 7 days.
Now, let's take a look at the market research feature of the Land Portal. And I want to zoom in on South Carolina, and I want to look at some of the counties in South Carolina. Now, what you see on the screen is that we've actually isolated the 5-to-10-acre market. So, you can segment market data by acreage in the Land Portal. We're going to continue the 5-to-10-acre market, and we're going to pull up a heat map of months of supply. Now, months of supply is the same metric months of inventory that we just discussed. It's just a different name. Granted, guys, when I look at months of inventory, anything 6 months or below is going to be a strong seller's market. Anything 6 to 10 months, I would say a weak seller's market, where property's going to be a little harder to buy, easier to sell, healthier market. You want to see 10 months of inventory or below. When you get above 10 months of inventory, all bets are off. That market is slow as molasses, and that is really going to be a buyer's market because the few buyers that are in that market have a lot of leverage over the sellers because the sellers need to cut sweetheart deals to get these properties moved.
Now, with that in mind, I want to go onto the map of South Carolina. I want to show you the counties and how they put the heat map together. What they're showing for months of supply here are that the red counties have high uh months of inventory. That's going to be slower markets with less buyer demand. Now, the green counties that they have are going to be low months of inventory and uh high buyer demand relative to the fewer listings that are available. And what's funny is that if you look in a state like South Carolina, where you have a lot of these rural counties, that if you drove around a lot of these counties, they they look very similar. In many ways, the markets behave similarly. The price points are not dramatically different from one county to the next. But what you actually see is that the months of inventory across different counties is dramatically different. And you can see Sumter County, South Carolina has 34.47 months of supply. Guys, that I mean, that's like almost 3 years of supply. Richland County, uh where I've actually bought land in Richland County, that's 31.63 months of supply. Frankly, thankfully, it didn't take me that long to sell that property. Lexington County, 25.01 months of supply. And Aiken County here is 7.89 months of supply, which means that that market is between three to five times faster moving than a lot of the counties that are right adjacent to it. Which all else equal, which of these four counties would you rather own property in? Probably Aiken County, right?
Now, let's say that I wanted to buy property, and I wanted to make sure I was buying property in a healthy market where not only could I sell that land in the future if I ever wanted to, but also that the the land I'm buying is more likely to appreciate. If there are more buyers in a market today than there are sellers, that means that there's going to be upward pressure on price, that there's going to be a floor underneath the current prices, and all else equal, the market prices are going to tend to rise.
So, let's take a look at the map search feature and and drill in to Aiken County and pull some data on some of the current listings in the market. So, what I'm going to do on the Land Portal is search state South Carolina, county we're going to search Aiken County. We're going to look at vacant lots. We're going to uh check acres 5 to 10 acres, and we're going to look at the MLS filters. This is where you can pull in the marketplace data, which is what we want to do here. We're going to look at MLS for sale, and then we're going to apply those filters. What you see is that we have 54 results. That means that there's 54 active listings on the market in that county in that acreage range. What we're going to do is click the list view. We're going to go in and actually price from low to high and start looking through all the different listings in the county.
Now, let's say, for example, one of them catches my eye, like this one on Milwood Drive. Well, when you click the listing on the Land Portal, what it does is it zooms right in on a map of the property. When you go in and you zoom in on the map of the property and you look at the environmental filters, what you find out is that, number one, there's no flood plain. That's good. There's no wetlands. That's also good, and it's really flat. We like that, too. When you look at the MLS overview, what you find is you have the marketplace data from the listing. So, you see that they have a listing photo that's uploaded. So, you have a nice aerial perspective on this land, and you also see a listing description of the property. So, you get all the other features that are active in the listing description. You can also see that currently they're asking $60,000.
Now, when you go back to the map of the property, I always look at the soil map because it shows me the prevailing soil series on the property. The big thing there is that you want deep, well-drained soil so that you can put a septic system into that property. When you look at the soil map, you see Carolina and Georgia sand hills. So, you have real sandy, very well-drained soil. That's generally going to be very good news if you want to put a septic system in. Just so you guys understand, even if you don't feel like building a home immediately, the ability that you have to put a single conventional septic system onto a property, that's going to be like 80% of the value of that land. So, that land may be worth, according to the Land Portal, $46,774, give or take. But that's if it has a septic location on the property. If it's unbuildable, that same property may sell for $10 or $12,000 dollars to a neighbor. The difference between those two outcomes has to do with soil geology that is actually invisible to the untrained eye. And so, the soil is like the biggest thing, and yet sellers are never going to disclose the the septic or soil suitability on a property. It's just something that you have to get used to.
Now, if I want the most accurate AI data for the potential value of this property, there's actually a feature that's available in the advanced subscription called an AI comp report. So, I'm going to go uh drill into the AI comp report. And what you see is that they they really break down a map of the property. They show the property by the terrain. They break up how much of a percentage of a property falls into certain slopes. They show 92 ft of road frontage. And they pull a more precise, more accurate, up-to-the-minute AI estimate of $43,920.22. So, when you look at the comparables, this is really what is driving the estimated value because the most up-to-date data in this estimate in the comp report is going to be driven off of the most relevant, most up-to-date sold comps. And so, if you look at this one, the first one they show is a 5-acre lot that sold 6 mi away at $42,000 bucks. So, to understand and compare the $43,920 price, I want to look apples-to-apples between these two properties and figure out which one's better. And if this one sold at $42,000, what does that mean about our property? So, we look at this comp and you zoom in on a map of the property. And what you see is at first, it's a 1 and 1/2 acre flag lot. But this was a 5-acre listing. And so, what you realize very quickly is that the adjacent property, the 3 and 1/2 acre lot to the north with the abandoned mobile home, is part of the property as well. So, it's really those two APNs together. It's a similar size property overall. The access is a little bit crummier cuz you have that dirt road, that flag lot access versus our property has direct drive-up road frontage onto a county road. It's got a little less privacy that the comp does. You have more neighbors right around you. You do have the two lots together. And so, in theory, you have a second home site. But I think in practice, the flag lot is so small, it's going to be difficult to manage the setbacks. And so, really, I think you have a a single 5-acre home site here. Now, when you look at the listing photos, you can see that there's a mobile home on the property there as well. But that doesn't really give it a whole lot of value because it's clearly not usable. You probably have to either pay a lot of money to renovate it or more likely, you would, you know, demo it. You pay some money to get that hauled away. But you perhaps have a septic system out there. Maybe there's a well. Maybe there's some value add where it's like a wash. And you have a little bit of value there. You also, on the comp property, you have sandy soil as well. So, it looks like if you need to put a new septic system in that you could do that.
So, going back to our property and comparing it to the comp that sold at $42,000 bucks, our land, I think, has better shape, has got better access in a slightly better neighborhood with more privacy. So, I would actually put it just a touch higher than the $42,000 property that sold around the way. And I would actually peg the value here on this one right around $44,000, which is right on the nose of the AI estimate. I agree with the AI 100% here.
So, for anybody out there that is interested in working with me and my team, I want to share some information on the two main solutions that we provide. First, for people that are interested in buying land in the future, but it may not be an immediate thing. It may be just a process of making sure that you have the right foundation, that you actually know how it works. And that you're confident running that process on your own in the foreseeable future when you do get around to starting the process, my team and I have created a program I think you're really going to like. It's called the Land Purchase Navigator. The Land Purchase Navigator, as far as I'm aware, is the first and only land buying system that's ever been developed. We package it as a self-guided online course, and we price it at a at a price that any land buyer can afford. It's beginner-friendly, which means that you don't need any experience uh in real estate or land at all to use it successfully. And what it includes is a 5-plus-hour video library of step-by-step video material that shows in-depth instruction and and tutorial training on the actual steps in the land buying process in order from beginning to end. So, you actually see exactly how it works from beginning to end. We identify all the common mistakes that land buyers will routinely make. And the systems that we developed are designed to reverse engineer those mistakes and allow first-time uh land buyers to actually navigate that process successfully and avoid the mistakes that can cost you money. So, guys, if you're interested, this is a program that is designed for people with no prior experience. But it has the attention to detail and the systems that are actually used by professional land investors and home builders across the US as well. So, if you're interested in checking out the Land Purchase Navigator, I'm going to leave a QR code here on the side of the screen and a link in the description below.
And if, on the other hand, you are actively planning to buy land and you want to buy your next property in the next 12 months, we've developed a private community and group coaching program called Land Camp. What Land Camp does is it provides a 6-month group coaching and mentorship program where people work directly with me and my team. So, what that includes is personalized mentorship. Uh it includes a weekly community call led by me where I'm going to teach you every step of the land buying process. I'm going to answer your questions that come up on your deals. We'll review property scenarios. We'll do real live uh real-time coaching on the some of the properties that you guys are getting ready to buy. Then I have a separate call that's a weekly office hours call where you can kind of just drop in. I make myself available. It's less formal. You can just ask questions and then we can do kind of more hands-on training and tutorial stuff related to the scenarios for your properties. It includes a vibrant community of peers because you're going to be learning not just from me, not just from your deals, but you're going to be learning from osmosis by looking at other students in the program that are at every stage of the land buying process. And you're just going to be seeing stuff that they're learning and challenges that they're overcoming that's going to give you a lot of insight into the process for your property as well. We're going to have a private Slack channel. We're going to have an AI We have an AI chatbot we've developed where we actually trained the AI on all of our internal systems, our knowledge base, our public and private videos. And you also have lifetime access to the Land Purchase Navigator through the program as well. So, if you're interested in Land Camp, you can click the link below and fill out a 2-minute application. And a member of our team is going to be in touch.
If you guys like that video, I think you're going to like the next video on our channel. It's called the Fire Sale on rural acreage has officially begun. It's going to walk you through every single step of the land buying process in order coming up.