Hi, I’m Beth with TB Properties Buys Land, and today I’m going to go over a few things that could potentially hold up or stop the sale of your rural vacant land. So, you’ve got rural vacant land, empty land that has been sitting there unused, and you’re finally ready to sell this. You make an agreement with a buyer. You have that lined up, whether it’s an investor like TB Properties Buys Land or whether you’ve got a realtor who’s working with you, what are a few things that could stop that sale from going forward and you getting paid for your property?
One of the things is access. Does your property have physical and legal access to it? What does that mean? Maybe there’s a road that goes near your property and you can physically get there, but what if legally, you’re not allowed to pass over somebody else’s land to go from that road to your property? How do you know if you have legal access? If you look at your deed, a lot of times that will tell you. It will say that you’ve got ingress and egress across someone else’s property to get to your land. If you don’t have legal access, the buyer may not want to buy your land anymore. They may not be able to build out there. They could run into the situation where another land owner puts a fence up or a gate up and prevents them from going to your property at one time. That could make somebody not want to purchase your land.
Now, maybe you have legal access across something like a road that’s platted but hasn’t been built yet, but there’s no physical road there. That may prevent somebody from wanting to purchase your property too. So we’ve covered how legal and physical access are generally really important when you’re selling your property.
Another thing that could hold up the sale of your property is a title issue. Do you own that land? Is your name on the deed, or was the property left to you from someone in your family or someone that you knew? Did you ever go through the proper channels to make sure that your name is now on that property? Are there multiple heirs to this property? A lot of times title can take care of that when working through that process. If there’s an affidavit of heirship or if there’s other paperwork that can be done, they can clear that chain of title and sell the property, but if that property was in somebody else’s name and they’re deceased, and there’s multiple heirs, that could be problematic if you can’t get all of the heirs to sign off on the sale. So that could hold up the sale of your property.
What about a survey? Has your property been surveyed? When was the last time it was surveyed? If the survey was many, many years ago, and if things have changed since then, land has been sold off, a title company may require an updated survey in order to sell that land. And the question regarding the survey is, who’s going to pay for that? Are you going to pay for that as the land seller or is the buyer going to pay for the survey? How much is that going to cost, and how long will that take in order to get surveyed, and how long will that hold up the closing process?
Another thing that could hold up the sale of your land would be what comes in on the title commitment. If you’re selling your land and you’re closing through title, the title company is going to put together a title commitment, and they send that out to the buyer and the seller for review. This will list items that are going to be excluded from title insurance. It will list what you as a seller need to clear in order to convey proper chain of title to the next buyer.
Now what could be found in there? Well, it could be just fine. There could be just standard exceptions that are included in there, or there could be some major red flags in which that buyer doesn’t want to purchase your property anymore. That could be anything from chain of title issues… It could mean that the property is in a flood zone… It could mean that there’s a nuclear burial site out there. Who knows? But that title commitment will include a lot of information and that buyer ultimately has to decide whether they want to purchase that property after reading through that title commitment or not.
Now, we’re actually working through the purchase of a property right now, and we’re having a unique problem in the purchase of this property. We’re required to get a survey of the property, and title’s got the order in their system, but it looks like the sellers, who are working with us, their family members sold off pieces of that property, and maybe those sales hadn’t been recorded. We’re still trying to figure out what’s going on, but right now, the title company doesn’t exactly know what parts of the property they still own in order to convey it to us.
The surveyors are having an issue with trying to survey the land and they’re waiting on the sellers to produce paperwork showing what has been deeded off to other people, whether it’s other members of the family, or if it’s legitimately been sold. It sounds kind of weird and to us, even as land investors who purchase multiple pieces of property, it’s a little bit strange, but the title company has explained to us that if the sellers don’t exactly know how much property they’ve got or what they have, surveyors can’t do their work, title company can’t do their work to insure the property, and it gets held up.
So, time will tell whether or not we are able to purchase this property, but we’ll find out as we work with the land sellers, with the surveyors, and with the title company. But I thought I would just throw that in because every once in a while, you have an odd ball that just shows up like that. Most of the time, we’re able to work with land sellers and we’re able to purchase their property. We close through title and because we close with cash, our process is a lot faster, and our sellers are able to get paid very quickly.
So if you have any questions about working with TB Properties Buys Land, how we work, and or if you have questions about whether something could potentially hold up the sale of your land, please reach out to us. We’re here to answer any questions that you might have. Thanks again for listening. I appreciate you.