When do you stop collecting comparable sales and commit to a price per lot

Been in almost exactly this loop on a 9-acre tract outside gray court last year, except I waited eleven weeks and lost the parcel to a cash buyer who offered $185k while I was still arguing with myself about whether the 2021 sales were too stale to use. What broke me out of it was forcing myself to answer one question only: can I survive the floor. Not the midpoint, not the upside, the floor. If six lots at $18k gross is $108k and I'm in at $210k plus $35k in engineering, clearing, and carry, that's a loss of $137k and I'm done investing for years, so the answer is no regardless of what the comps say. If I can structure the offer so I can't get that deep, earnest money exposure only, feasibility period with a hard out, seller carry that comes off if the back lots don't perc, then the comp paralysis is actually just fear wearing a spreadsheet. The new subdivision two miles north is real signal, not noise. I'd call the listing agent and ask straight how many lots they've contracted in the last 90 days and at what price. That's a 20-minute call worth more than six weeks of comp pulls.

Six weeks is a long time, though the 2022 comp at $42k is the real problem here. That number is doing a lot of work in your upside case and upstate sc raw land has softened since then, interior parcels especially. Lot sales in comparable rural sc counties have been clearing in the $24k to $28k range, well under $42k. The new subdivision two miles north is worth being cautious about too. Marketed is not sold, and a platted lot with infrastructure is a different product from your raw parcels, so it may not lift your exits the way you are hoping. Your $28k inference on the back four needs at least one closed sale from the last nine months to lean on, otherwise it is just hope that the market moved your direction. A hard downside stress test would run six lots at $21k, which is $126k gross, and ask whether the deal makes sense at a price that clears that floor after entitlement costs, carrying, and whatever the engineer charges to find out the back four will not perc. If $210k sits above what survives that math, the offer writes itself and the extra comps do not change it.

The framing of when to stop is the wrong question, because it treats the comparable search like it is converging on a truth that is sitting there waiting to be found. It is not. You have already found the truth: this deal is binary on the topography, and no amount of comp pulling resolves that. The move is to stop modeling exit price entirely until you have spent $800 to $1200 getting a preliminary perc opinion from a soil scientist on those back four lots, before you are under contract rather than after. In laurens county the septic approval variance between a good site and a marginal one runs far past $3k per lot. It decides whether a lot is sellable at all. You are agonizing over whether interior lots move at $24k or $28k when the real binary is eight lots or six, and you can close that uncertainty with a phone call and a site visit before you ever shake hands on $210k. On the stress test, the downside case is six lots at $18k gross with twelve months of carry if the new subdivision two miles north saturates the buyer pool before the last two interior parcels close. That is $108k gross on a $210k acquisition, plus closing, survey, road improvements if the county requires them for lot certification, and your time. Run that number first. If you cannot survive it without the deal blowing up your position, then the real choice is between an offer contingent on preliminary soil results and walking right now. The comp paralysis is real, and it is a symptom of that binary rather than the problem itself.

The range is a distraction. The back four lots are the actual variable, and everything else in that math is close enough to work with. So the move is to stop running comps entirely and spend $800 to $1,200 on a perc test on the worst-looking lot back there before anything else happens. Six weeks of analysis has not answered the one question that separates your two deals. A thursday afternoon with a soil scientist does. On pricing, laurens county interior lots without road frontage have been moving closer to $21k to $23k over the last 12 months, under the $24k you are using, based on how similar parcels around the clinton and gray court pockets have traded. A $24k floor looks a touch optimistic if the back four get no road access of any kind, and that compresses the downside further than your model shows. The new subdivision two miles north pulling buyers in is real and worth counting, though $2k per lot is a more defensible weighting than $4k. Buyers drawn by new development still price-shop hard on raw land, especially anything more than a 20 minute drive from a grocery store. Where this parcel sits relative to cross hill or laurens town center is doing a lot of unseen work in the per-lot number, and the comp range is not capturing that cleanly.