Beth:
Hi, I’m Beth with TB Properties Buys Land. In the last video, we began our discussion talking about the cost of selling your vacant land. We first talked about getting it ready to list. What does that entail? We discussed cost considerations if there are any legal issues that need to be cleaned up or if your survey is too old and you need a new survey, and we also discussed a couple other things. In this video, we’re going to talk about marketing. In our final video we will talk a little bit about closing costs and how that affects the cost of selling your property.
When it comes to marketing your bare land, you can absolutely market and sell your property yourself. It’s what you call a for sale by owner. If you own the property yourself, you can list it as the for sale by owner. When it comes to doing this, there is a cost to marketing a property, even if it is just vacant land. We did talk about getting it ready to list, prepping it to make it pretty, but now it’s ready. So what about pictures? Pictures and video really sell a property. Do you have the expertise, the talent, to get out there and take top notch marketable pictures? Can you get a drone shot to adequately portray your 10-acre, your 20-acre, or your 100-acre property with an aerial view so that people can get an understanding of what you’re actually trying to sell? If not, you need to be able to locate a good, experienced drone pilot who can take those pictures and video and provide you with the marketing material that you’re going to need in order to easily market and sell your property.
What about listing your property for sale? Is it as easy as just putting a sign out front and hoping it’s going to sell? If you want to sell your property quickly, you need to be marketing your property everywhere. When it comes to putting it on the MLS, you don’t have to be a realtor or have a realtor in order to list it, but there is a cost to doing so, and it depends on where you’re located. The closer you are to a bigger metropolitan area, the more expensive it can be, but you can look around and find ways to flat list your property on the MLS for a reasonable cost. That is a cost to factor in. When it comes to flat-listing your property, you will have to select whether you can put it up on the MLS for six months or a year and how many pictures you want in your ad. Often times they charge you more for the extra pictures and the video so you will have to select the best package. Everybody does it a little bit differently, but make sure that you set aside some money for that.
If you want to get your property out there where a lot of potential land buyers are looking, you need to be on a land subscription site, but those sites can be quite expensive. It can cost you a hundred plus dollars a month just to list your property on a good land subscription website. Even so, the benefit to doing this is that you’re getting hundreds of people looking at your property, depending on the area. If you want to sell your property quickly, this would be a great place to be, but it’s going to cost you monthly. And again, how long is your property going to be on the market before you’re able to sell it is the big question. That means you must plan for monthly subscription costs for an unknown amount of time.
Right now, we just came off of a seller’s market. If you’ve been watching the news, you see that people are starting to drop home prices. Things are starting to stabilize in the housing market, especially as interest rates are going up and loans are more difficult to come by. If you have looked around, you may be seeing this here in the land market as well. We’re seeing this too but every area of the country is a little different. I can’t speak for everywhere but it is starting to drop and stabilize. So that’s something to think about. You may find that over time you have to lower your price. It may take longer for you to sell your property. As you can see, there is a marketing cost. Be ready for that monthly marketing costs when it comes to selling your property.
After planning for all of the marketing costs, you might end up saying, “You know what? I don’t have the money to do this. I don’t want to spend time marketing my property on my own. I’ll just use a realtor.” Well, there still is a marketing cost involved when using a realtor. That gets into your closing costs to some degree, but you do want to be aware of how much money you’re going to lose when using a realtor. When you think about using a realtor, the charges tend to be split between the buy side but… that’s negotiable. Whoever may be buying your property might say, “Hey, Mr. Seller, I’ll buy your property, but I want you to cover my realtor costs.” In order to sell your property, you as Mr. or Ms. Seller may have to cover that in order to facilitate the sale of your property.
When it comes to selling a home, you’re probably aware the realtor fee is a 6% split. That is often not the case with vacant land. You have to think about the commission of a land realtor: land doesn’t cost as much as a home. For instance, a home might cost $100,000, $200,000 or much more versus maybe a $10,000, $20,000, or $50,000 piece of land. There’s not as much money for them to make when selling a lower cost piece of land, and then they have to add on the additional costs they incur when selling your land. They will have to drive out to the remote area where your property is located multiple times, they have to hold people’s hands and walk them over your 10 acre, 20 acre+ property, they may have to walk them through poison ivy and brush, and who knows what else. Due to all of these factors they tend to charge a 10% in that split. As you can see, when utilizing a realtor, there is a marketing cost. Someone’s got to pay for those pictures, and someone’s got to pay for their time and the contracts and whatnot. Even when using a realtor, there is no guarantee as to how quickly your property will sell. It may be on the market for quite some time. Whether you use a realtor, which is totally fine, or whether you sell it yourself, there is a marketing cost that you need to allot for and prepare for. Make sure you’ve got that money set aside.
If none of this is super appealing, please know there is another way. You can sell your property on your own and work with a real estate investor like TB Properties Buys Land. We will buy your property, as is, for cash, and we close through a title company so there’s protection for you and for us. In this scenario, you wouldn’t need to pay to get a new survey done. You wouldn’t need to spend the time and money on attorney fees to fix your legal stuff. We, as the buyers, would do that in Title. You don’t need to go and get someone to get out there for a day and a half to clear the brush and make your property clean and pretty. You don’t need to worry about marketing it. That would be our job to do.
If this is preferable to you, please feel free to reach out to us. We make you a cash offer. We cover all the closing costs. And we try to do this as quickly as we can so that you guys have cash in your pocket quickly. But if you have questions, please feel free to reach out to us. We look forward to working with you. Give us a call, shoot us an email, or reach out across our website. Thanks again. Have a great day.