All Forum Posts by: Matthew Bailey

@Pau Kha I suppose the bottom line is that you deserve to be paid, at a minimum, the appraised value of your townhome. If the HOA can improve the zoning of the land you live on then the value should go up, hopefully enough that someone could buy all of you out and the numbers still work for them. Maybe the simplest thing to do is to just get an appraisal on your home and say you want at least that much, plus something for your trouble

@Pau Kha gotcha, yea that probably doesn't warrant getting a subscription to a data provider. You need like sold commercial land over the past 2 or 3 years. You could ask brokers to pull comps for you but you're not a buyer so that's (frankly) kind of a waste of their time (in their eyes). You could always just insist that the HOA get it appraised before selling it, but be careful because appraisers aren't always great at appraising land. Plus it sounds like you'll have demo and mitigation costs that you won't be able to see that are factoring into the buyer's offer price.

@Pau Kha how many parcels are you looking for?  A resource like CoreLogic RealQuestPro has a ton of sold comp data in states that are disclosure states (like CA) some states (like TX) don't require you to disclose the sales price and sold comp data is hard.  AgentPro247 is a similar product that you may be able to get a check subscription for or order property reports one at a time.

First though you may just want to try your county assessors office.  If you can find the deed you can back out the purchase price from the transfer tax rate.  Or sometimes it's just listed in the assessor's data.  Likewise some GIS mapping systems have links to good data.

@Julio Vasquez where are you generating land leads from? Do you do SFR's and folks are saying "I've got this land over here that I don't want"?

I can tell you that as a land investor I know folks who work in the AZ area, it's super competitive for land investors and they need to be acquiring the land around 25% of the "for sale" like kind property.  Make sure it isn't land locked (it has direct road access) and you'll have yourself a deal that a land investor would pay for.

As for your thoughts on how to value the land based on highest and best use, I'd say that most land investors are flipping and not improving or splitting.  The returns are better to buy low sell high than they are to buy and wait for timely subdivision or improvements.  So you're either going to sell to a land wholesaler quickly and easily or to a developer which is more difficult because they're harder to find.  

Go on LandsOfAmerica.com, sort by price and map the area where your lot is.  The first 3-4 people that are signature members are going to be land wholesalers.  See what their cash price is and if you can get it to them for 50% of that you can keep anything else and everyone wins.  So if the cheapest lot is 9k cash price, and you get it under contract for 3k, you can probably get it to the land guy for 4-4.5k and make 1k.  Those are the margins they want so if it's not 25% of for sale or 40-50% of the signature guys' pricing it's probably not worth your time or theirs.

Hope that helps!

@Timothy Douglas I invest in vacant lots.  I'll send you a PM and you can provide me with the portfolio and I can quote it out.  Presently infill lots (small lots ready for one house, typically 0.25ac or smaller) are less desirable in the land investing sphere because new construction takes a big hit during recessions.  My present infill lot inventory has gotten a lot less traffic lately but my rural larger acreage seems to be hanging in there.  

@Nate J. did you ever find an example of this document?

Craigslist is a good place to sell land, as is Facebook marketplace

As a land investor, I'd sell it for cash and reinvest the funds in more real estate, cash land flips to be exact, but really you could put that cash somewhere you have experience investing.

You could turn it into cash flow by selling with owner financing.

I haven't done improvements so I'm not sure about the other options, I'll let others chime in there.  Sounds like you want to play around with improving it.

Seth's podcast episode 39 got me into land, been doing it for 3 years now.  You could start by reading his blog haha, REtipster.com.  It has answers to all of your questions.  Hope that help!

I'm a land investor. You certainly can wholesale (assign a contract) land. However it's generally tough to find a buyer for land as quickly as you would find a buyer for an investment SFR or Multi, so assignment contracts on land are generally for as long as you can get, at least 6 months. Moreover, if you don't have an investor in your pocket to assign it to then it's difficult to explain to an "end buyer" what an assignment is and how it works.

In general, with land, it's either a good enough deal and I'll take title to it before reselling it, or it's not good enough and it's not worth tying to assign.