Getting the buyer to sell land

[Armando Duran]

Hey BP members,

I want to see if i can get some pointers on how to go about a land buy.

Last Saturday we noticed that our neighbor was packing her stuff out of her mobile home and people were loading up her belongings. I was curios and my dad and I talked to her to see what was going on and she told us that her brother was the owner of the property and that he was going to sell it. So then we reached out to her brother to see about us potentially buying the property and he replied back to us.

Now my dilemna is that the owner replied back saying that he wants to build a house on this property and sell it after. He mentioned that it would roughly be selling for 400k min. and that we would need to reach out his realtor if we wanted to buy it.

So based off of he told me I reached out to a couple people I know and they told me to build a house I would be looking at $200 a sq ft. If the owner is targeting 400k min after build that would potentially  be building a 1500sq ft home @ $200 per sq. ft. putting you at 300k then selling at 400k. with a profit of roughly 100k. (now I think $200 sq. ft. seems high but I'm no expert) also i didn't account realtor fees or other costs just keeping it super simple based off what I currently know.

So what I wanted to present to the seller is why not just sell me the land for the 100k and avoid the build process if at the end of the day the profit would be roughly the same?

Has anybody ran into a situation similar to this or have any tips that could help? Also the reason we really want to land is because it butts up to the left side of a property and the back side of a property. It would be an extension of from 4 acres to 6 acres.

I understand there are other factors that he may know that I don't like for instance he might be able to build for $120 a sq. ft. and etc...

I will be talking to him tomorrow.


Description of the property: About 1/4 of an acre gets mowed and the rest is heavily congested trees and shrubbery but it has an existing septic and water well.

FYI the title is supposed to read "Getting the owner to sell me the land" but I can't find where to edit that on here?