$2,400 land marketing package on a 62 acre listing, or the two road photos the agent does for free

Listing 62 acres this spring. Mixed pasture and timber, county road frontage on one side, a seasonal creek, no utilities run to it. List price I'm working toward is $410k. Taxes on it are around $1,900 a year, so my carrying cost while it sits is basically nothing, which is different from every flip thread I read here.

The agent's standard marketing for land is two photos from the road and the tax parcel number. That's it. She also works with an outfit that does a land package for $2,400: drone stills and a short flyover, a boundary overlay on aerial imagery, a topo and soils sheet pulled from the county and NRCS data, and a one page site with the whole thing downloadable.

She thinks land here takes six to nine months to move at a fair number. I believe her.

My question is whether marketing content does anything on an asset like this. A house buyer is comparing four houses in a week. A land buyer is a guy who's been looking for two years and will drive it himself before he offers. So maybe the aerials just get him to drive it sooner.

On the other hand every time I've looked at a land listing with no boundary map I've assumed the seller doesn't know where his own lines are, and I've skipped it.

$2,400 on $410k is a rounding error, so I'm not agonizing over the money. I'm trying to figure out if I'm buying anything.

3 replies

1chriswalton8CC1CPRO8

One caution on the topo and soils sheet. If it's pulled straight from public data it's a convenience, and the buyer's going to verify anyway. But if the flyer starts implying things about buildability or acreage it can come back at you, and an aerial overlay is not a survey. Ask them to label it as such on the page. Cheap fix, and it keeps the marketing honest about what it is.

1Rena Expert

The math you set up gets to the right place for the wrong reason. Your carrying cost is near zero, so the package can't be justified as a speed purchase the way it is on a flip. The case for it is buyer pool size, and specifically the size of the pool that will consider the parcel at all before driving it.

Rural land moves slowly because buyers can't resolve basic uncertainty from a listing. Where are the lines, how much of the 62 is actually usable, what does the timber to pasture split look like, does the creek cut the tract in two. Every one of those questions that stays open removes buyers who won't spend a Saturday to find out. A boundary overlay and a flyover answer them for the price of a scroll. That's what you're buying, and @bramble is describing exactly the behavior it's aimed at.

Two things determine whether $2,400 is well spent. First, whether the listing agent has a distribution channel that reaches land buyers, since good content sent nowhere does nothing. Ask her where the package actually gets posted and how many land listings she moved last year. Second, how much price uncertainty exists in your area. Roughly a dozen states don't make sale prices public at all, and in those markets buyers have less to anchor on, which raises the value of anything that makes your specific tract legible.

@sable's point about labeling stands. An aerial overlay reflects assessor parcel data and is not a survey, and how much a marketing representation can be relied on varies by state, so keep the disclaimer on the page and get the content ownership terms in writing before you pay.

$2,400 land marketing package on a 62 acre listing, or the two road photos the agent does for free

3 replies