The part worth pulling out of this deal is that the $9,700 commission was not really a cost, it was a price discovery mechanism. Your agent's zoning work and that buyer match compressed the timeline and preserved the value of the asset. An eleven-month sit on raw land carries its own soft costs, and a buyer without soil knowledge on adjacent parcels would almost certainly have required contingency time you no longer had to give.
The assumption doing the most work in your original framing was that commission negotiation is where value gets captured. On land transactions specifically, that is rarely where the money lives. Land is illiquid, comparables are sparse, and buyer qualification is a different problem than it is in residential. The agent who already knows the soil situation on the neighboring parcel is a structurally different input than one who is simply willing to list.
The risk you did not mention: this outcome depended heavily on a single agent's specific local knowledge and her willingness to do zoning research outside her formal scope. That is not repeatable by design. The next parcel will not automatically surface an agent with the same profile. If raw land is a strategy you plan to run again, the question worth sitting with is how you source and evaluate listing agents before you have inventory, so the agent selection is not reactive.
The post-settlement disclosure mechanics your agent navigated, written seller approval for any buyer-agent compensation offered outside the MLS, are worth confirming with her in writing on future deals. The framework is settled, but how individual brokerages implement it varies. Confirm current terms with her directly.
What is your process for evaluating the agent before you have a parcel to list?
