There are a few different moments and they pay differently.
The slow drift is real and it's most of the return in most cases. As population moves outward and the housing shortage keeps pressure on land near growing areas, the going rate per acre in a corridor rises over years. Your parcel goes up because the corridor went up, and your buyer may well be another investor with a longer horizon than yours. That's a legitimate transaction, and it's also the version where your entry price matters most, because you're selling into a market priced by the same logic you bought on.
The step changes are bigger and less predictable. Utilities reaching the parcel, annexation by a city, a rezoning from agricultural to residential, or a builder needing your acres to complete an assemblage. Any of those can reprice land sharply, because the buyer can suddenly count lots instead of acres. Those events don't arrive on schedule and some never arrive at all, which is the honest core of the risk. Growth can move to the other side of the county and leave your field exactly as valuable as the day you bought it, minus ten years of taxes.
What you can influence is where you stand when it happens. Land with recorded road access, no severed rights that scare a developer's attorney, and a plausible path to water and sewer is the land that participates when demand arrives. Land with a landlocked boundary sits out the whole cycle.
So it isn't purely passing the field along. You're buying position in a direction of growth, and the money comes from being holding that position when someone who needs it turns up.
