The seller sent me his list of what a vacant parcel costs him each year

Question

I asked a seller on a 12 acre listing what his annual carrying costs were and he sent a short list. Property taxes, a vacant land liability policy, a couple of mowings, and a subscription to some parcel data service he uses for tracking sales in the county.

The insurance line surprised me. There's no building on it. What is a policy on an empty field actually covering, and is it something people genuinely buy or is he being cautious? And on the data subscription, my property management work already has me paying for enough software. Curious what people in this room actually pay for versus get free from the county.

Rena Guide · Accepted Answer

A vacant land liability policy covers claims from someone getting hurt or causing harm on your land. A trespasser on a dirt bike, a tree on your side of the line falling onto a neighbor's fence, a hunter who lets himself in. You own the ground, so a claim can come to you even with nothing built on it. These policies are usually inexpensive, often a few hundred dollars a year for acreage, and many carriers will add the land to an existing homeowners or umbrella policy as an endorsement instead of writing something standalone. Availability and what's excluded vary by state and by carrier, so ask your agent to quote both ways.

On licensing: buying and holding land for yourself needs no license anywhere. Marketing or selling land on someone else's behalf is what triggers licensing rules, and those rules differ by state.

For data, county GIS and the assessor's parcel search are free almost everywhere and will give you ownership, assessed value, acreage, and usually a zoning layer. Paid parcel and sales platforms generally run somewhere around $50 to $150 a month for a single-user plan, and their value is mostly in comparing across county lines quickly. In roughly a dozen states sale prices aren't public at all, so check whether the subscription can actually show you prices where you're buying before you pay for it.

The line that dwarfs all of these is property taxes, and unlike the others it tends to climb as development approaches.

aaron_fitz10 · Answer

The dirt bike thing is real. There's a whole area near me where every field has a homemade no trespassing sign and people ride through anyway.

priya_n21 · Answer

So the full annual bill on 12 acres might be, what, a tax bill plus a few hundred of insurance plus a couple hundred a cut. Under two thousand a year in a lot of places. That's less painful than I assumed.

stephen_ok9 · Answer

@marlow the annual bill isn't where the cost is. On a $120k parcel the foregone return on the $120k is many times the mowing. People fixate on the small visible line items.

ehernandez74 · Answer

I'd ask that seller for the actual tax statements for the last five years rather than a summary. The trend line tells you whether the county has already started revaluing toward development, which is more useful than the current number.

raj_mehta14 · Answer

Does a liability policy on land do anything about environmental issues? Old dumping, a buried tank from a farmstead that used to sit there. That seems like a bigger exposure than a dirt bike.

brandonlee36 · Answer

@vellum generally no, pollution is excluded from standard liability forms, and that's why people order a Phase I environmental site assessment on parcels with any industrial or agricultural history. Quotes I've seen for one on modest acreage sit around $2,000 to $3,500. Worth it if there was ever a barn with a fuel tank.

nicole_adeyemi · Answer

On the free side, don't skip the planning department's long range future land use map. It's usually a PDF on the county website and it tells you what the county thinks that ground becomes. No subscription reproduces it well.

karen_whitfield · Answer

I pay for nothing but the tax bill and a policy. The county site and a phone call to the planner cover the rest. Data subscriptions are for people buying volume, and land banking done properly is a handful of parcels over a very long time.

The seller sent me his list of what a vacant parcel costs him each year

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