Beth:
Hi, I’m Beth with the TB Properties Buys Land. Today, we’re going to continue the discussion on what can affect the offer price for your vacant land property. In the previous videos, we touched upon access to your property, utilities and what that means, topographical features to your property, flood zone or wetlands and how all of those can either help or hinder your ability to sell your property as well as the offer price you might receive for your property.
To continue our discussion on what can affect the offer price on your vacant land, today we will discuss “comps” or market comparables. First, it is important to understand that’s really subjective how each person might comp a property. Ideally, we try to identify the most like-kind property that is closest to yours. Despite the fact that there may be many different properties for sale currently in your county or in your immediate area, it could make a difference in worth if your property is located north of a particular highway and south of the highway. One side of the town or another could drastically influence the sales price per acre for property out there. That is really important to understand.
In addition to proximity, we also look for the closest in terms of features. Is your property on the side of a mountain; whereas a competing property on the market that sells for a high price per acre is very flat and ready to build upon. Maybe your property has more trees that need to be thinned, or is covered in brush that badly needs a cleanup. Maybe the road is not very good. Maybe one property that you’re seeing out there that you’re comping really high, has an asphalt road to it, whereas yours is a private road that’s not well-maintained.
As you can see, these are things that you have to consider when you’re looking at comping a property. We see a lot of people who will see properties on the market and they automatically think that they should be getting a lot more, and maybe they’re right, but at the same time, they could be really far off based upon some of these features, or even based upon proximity. There may be other things that you haven’t even considered. In one case, a neighboring property had a pig farm and the filth of that property dramatically brought down the value of the neighboring properties.
Another thing that affects comps is when they were listed or sold. For example, you might look at some past sales from six years ago, when prices might have been a lot lower per acre in several areas. With the advent of COVID, property prices skyrocketed. Now, we’ve started to see those fall back again. It may be important to note that just because your property might’ve been worth something four years ago in the height of COVID, it may not be worth that at this time. On the flip side, we’ve seen properties in some horrible areas where a developer came in, they sold property for six figures for a lot, and now we look at it and maybe it’s underwater, it’s in a wetlands area, and it’s really worth $10,000, $20,000 today. That truly makes me sad to see property values plummet like that.
Don’t always believe that your property price will go up over time; most of the time it appreciates but that’s not always the case, so you want to look at all of those factors mentioned earlier. When you look at comps and you consider all of the features and amenities, that can give you a better idea of what your property may be worth. There are other considerations, and I’ll cover those in future videos.
Again, here at TB Properties Buys Land, we purchase vacant land all over the United States. We pay with cash. We only purchase through a reputable title company that is certified to do business within the county where your property is located. We close through Title Companies for your safety as well as ours. We like that you can trust the paperwork’s going to be done right and that the whole transaction’s going to be accurate.
If you have questions, please feel free to reach out to us across our website, through email or phone. We look forward to hearing from you and working with you soon. Thank you.