11.4 acres under contract at $9,400. Did I do well?

Did you confirm the tax status yourself at the treasurer's office rather than taking her word? $180 a year sounds low for 11 acres unless it's in an agricultural or forestry use classification. If it is, and the classification comes off when it transfers or when a buyer changes the use, the annual tax your end buyer pays could be several times that, and there can be a rollback assessment for prior years in some states. That's a number I would want before I priced anything, because it changes the monthly payment story you're selling.

The seasonal creek is the line I'd stop on. A blue line on GIS across the back corner can mean nothing, and it can mean a hydric soil area that limits where anyone puts a cabin or a septic system. I bought a small parcel two years ago where about a third of it turned out to be soggy most of the year, and the buyers who wanted a homestead site all walked once they saw it in March.

Pull the county soil survey, it's free, and look at the septic suitability ratings. If the dry portion still supports a building site you're fine. If it doesn't, you're selling to hunters at hunter prices.

How long do you think you'll be sitting on it? That's the part I never see people put in the pro forma. If cash exit at $24,900 takes nine months of listing and the terms deal takes three, the terms deal is a different animal even before the interest.

Running your costs since that's what I'm always doing to my own deals. Purchase $9,400. Title and closing on the buy, call it $700 to $900 in a rural county, though recording fees and any transfer tax depend on your state. Your mailer to get here, 600 letters at maybe $0.75 all in, that's $450 attributable to this deal only if you count the whole campaign against it. Taxes while you hold, $180 a year prorated. Survey if you do it, $1,100. Marketing and closing on the sale, another $800 to $1,200 plus whatever you pay for photos or a drone flight.

So you're around $11,500 to $12,500 in before you get paid. A $24,900 cash exit is roughly a $12,500 gross. That's a real deal. It isn't a $15,000 deal, which is how it'll get described later.

Buy the title policy even though it's cheap land. The cost of skipping it shows up on the resale, not on the purchase.

Nobody has said anything about making it look like something. Right now you have 11 acres of woods that a buyer can't walk through. A brush cut trail from the road to a clearing changes what people feel when they get out of the truck, and mine have run $600 to $1,800 depending on how much has to come down.

Where it goes wrong is that you get out there and decide you also want to open up a two acre building pad and put in a gravel turnaround, and then you're $6,000 deep on a parcel you paid $9,400 for. Pick the one improvement and stop.

@juniper the month nine question is the right one to be stuck on, and I'd want the answer written down before I offered terms at all. If a buyer stops paying, what you can actually do depends heavily on the instrument and the state. A contract for deed where you hold title until payoff can have a forfeiture process in some states and can be treated much like a mortgage requiring foreclosure in others. That's an attorney conversation in the state where the land sits, and it should happen before your first buyer signs anything, not after they default.

Take the cash. $24,900 in 90 days on $12k in gets you back to hunting. The terms version has you collecting $400 a month for seven years from someone you met once, and the day you want capital for a better parcel you're selling that note to someone like @tender at a discount that eats most of the premium you charged.

I know the interest looks good on paper. Paper isn't the same as having the money.

@flint that's fair but the arithmetic isn't nothing. $3,000 down plus 84 payments on $26,900 at 9% is roughly $433 a month, so about $36,000 collected plus the down. Against a $24,900 cash sale that's a meaningfully bigger number, and juniper's capital is $12k, not $12 million, so the opportunity cost of one tied-up parcel is one parcel.

The part that decides it is how many deals a year she can source. If she can find one of these a quarter, tying up capital hurts. If this is the only one she'll find this year, holding paper is the better use of it.

Who collects the payments? I looked at doing something like this and got as far as realizing I did not want to be the person calling someone about a late $433 in December. There are third party note servicers that handle the collection and the amortization statements, and I've seen quotes in the $20 to $35 per note per month range, which on a $433 payment is a real slice. Worth pricing before you decide the interest income is passive.

List it both ways in the same ad. Cash price $24,900 or $3,000 down and $433 a month. You'll learn in three weeks which buyer shows up in that county instead of guessing now.

Seconding @anchor and adding the paperwork side, since that's what interests me. The two common structures are a contract for deed, where you keep legal title and deliver the deed at payoff, and a deed with a note secured by a mortgage or deed of trust, where the buyer takes title on day one and you hold a lien. Which one is normal, and which one gives you a workable remedy on default, varies a lot by state, and some states have consumer protections that attach when the buyer intends to live on the property.

There are also federal rules around residential owner financing that can apply depending on whether the property is or will be a dwelling and how many you do a year. Whether any of that touches a raw recreational parcel is exactly the kind of question you pay a local real estate attorney a few hundred dollars to answer once, and then you reuse the answer for years.

On the rental side the analogy that holds is the down payment. My worst tenants were the ones who scraped the deposit together at the last minute, and I'd guess the land buyer who can only manage $500 down on a $29,900 parcel is the one who stops paying in month nine. If you go terms, the size of the down payment is the strongest thing you control.

On comps, be careful how confident you get. Roughly a dozen states don't make sale prices public at all, so depending on where this is, that $2,600 an acre you got off a road sign might be the only real data point available to you. In non-disclosure states I've had to build comps from asking prices and then call the listing agents afterward to ask what it actually closed at. Some tell you, some don't.

Also, three active listings is a supply signal. If those three have been sitting since last spring, your $24,900 is competing with them and their sellers are further along in getting tired.

Will an agent even take this? A $24,900 listing at a normal commission is a few hundred dollars of work for someone, and the rural agents I've talked to are picky about small land. If the answer is no you're marketing it yourself, which is doable but it's a job.

If there's a ditch between that gravel road and the property line, price a culvert and an apron before you advertise road frontage. A short driveway entrance with a culvert pipe and gravel has run me $1,500 to $4,000 depending on pipe size and whether the county wants a permit for the tie-in, and the county usually does. Buyers standing at a ditch with no way to drive in discount the parcel in their heads by more than the culvert costs.