Tried the marketplace platforms as a contract seller. Almost nothing.

31 views in five weeks is the number that tells the story. That's not a pricing problem. Nobody looked.

Your diagnosis is close and one piece is off. The platforms are built around a buyer search that mostly filters on house-shaped criteria, so vacant land often has no path to the buyers who want it even when those buyers are on the platform. That part you have right.

The piece worth separating is the audience size question. A marketplace works by matching, not by exposure. Its value is the vetted buyer who already told the platform what they want. If no buyer on that platform has ever said "infill lots in a secondary city," the size of the audience is irrelevant and you get exactly what you got. Five direct calls to known land buyers would have been a better match process, and it also would have been faster, which matters because in disposition the spread and the odds both decay with time on market.

On the earnest money, whether you had any route to recover it depends on the contract language and what your inspection or feasibility period allowed, and that varies by state and by how the contract was drafted. A real estate attorney in that state reading the actual contract is the only way to know, and it's worth asking even after the fact if the amount matters to you.

One thing to check before the next attempt. Some of these platforms will tell you their buyer counts by asset type in a given metro if you ask. If the answer for land in your market is single digits, you know not to list.

Disposition is a buyer network problem. Land buyer networks and house buyer networks barely overlap.

The bit that lands for me is "I was inventory nobody was searching for." I've watched the same thing happen with trade services on referral sites. Being listed somewhere with a lot of traffic does nothing if the traffic is looking for a different thing.

Question on the underwriting rather than the platform. At 42k contract and 49k ask, a buyer's total spend is 49k plus closing plus whatever entitlement or utility work the lot needs. Did you know what that number was? Because if the two people offering 40k were land buyers who'd priced sewer tap and grading, they may have been telling you the market price and you'd have read it as lowballing. Losing 4k of earnest to hold a 7k ask you couldn't get is a worse outcome than taking 40k and losing 2k.

@sextant that's the question I had too. @orchard did you ever get comps on recent lot sales in that city, or was the 49k just your contract plus a fee you wanted?

Also, and this is my own bias since I'm researching holding patterns, I don't understand why the plan changed. Two infill lots in a growing small city at 42k and 28k sounds like exactly the thing you'd hold. Was it capital or something about the parcels?

Five weeks is a long time to leave something on a platform that isn't producing. Five years of running a service business taught me that if a channel gives you nothing in two weeks it gives you nothing in ten. You had time to pivot to phone calls and you spent it waiting.

Sorry if this is obvious, but why would a platform let you list something its buyers can't search for? Do they not filter what gets posted?

@wren because listings are free inventory for them and cost them nothing. The incentive is to accept everything and let sellers work out whether it fits.

@orchard the part I'd sit with is that you took on two contracts you didn't want. I move slowly and probably too slowly, but the version of this loss I'd never have is the one where the exit plan was invented after the contract was signed. Did you have a buyer in mind when you tied them up, or was the plan always to close and hold?

Running your numbers: 70k of contract value, 13k of asks, 4k of earnest lost. So the failed attempt cost you roughly 5.7 percent of contract value plus five weeks. That's not catastrophic and it's cheap tuition for learning that platform buyer pools are segmented by asset type.

What's wrong with my framing is that it ignores what you could have had. If @sextant is right that 40k was a fair market bid, your actual loss versus best available action is 4k earnest plus 2k of spread you refused, so about 6k against a realistic 4k gain. That's a 10k swing and it happened because you priced off your contract instead of off the market.

What I take from this whole thread is that the dispo skill is a specific buyer network in a specific asset type, and it doesn't transfer. @orchard is clearly good at land and had no land buyers. Someone with 200 house buyers would have been just as stuck with these two lots.