"Just take it off my hands," she wrote. Now what?

Question

I sent 300 letters on 5 to 40 acre parcels in two rural counties. One reply, from a woman in another state who inherited 12 acres from an uncle and has been paying $190 a year in taxes on it since. Her exact words were that she'd take almost anything to stop dealing with it.

So now what? I don't know what to offer. Comps in that county are thin, I found three sales in eighteen months and one of them was clearly family to family. I also read somewhere that you should never name a price first on land, let the seller do it. She already did, sort of, she said "almost anything," which isn't a number.

And if I do buy it, do I turn around and list it, or is the owner-financing thing something you set up from day one? I don't understand at what point in this I become the bank.

Rena Guide · Accepted Answer

"Almost anything" is a signal about her motivation, not an offer, so you still have to build a number from the resale side backward. Work out what you think the parcel sells for in a reasonable time, then subtract your closing costs, your holding costs while it sits, and the profit you need. What's left is your ceiling, and you offer below that.

On the timing question: you become the bank at resale, not at purchase. You buy the 12 acres outright for cash, take title, and then when you find an end buyer you offer them installment terms instead of asking for the full price up front. They put a down payment down, sign a contract, and pay you monthly with interest. Banks mostly won't write loans on raw rural land, so a buyer who can't pay cash has few options, which is why terms let you ask more than a cash price. The trade is that your money stays in the deal for years.

The part that catches people at your stage is title and access on inherited parcels. An uncle who died without a clear estate transfer can leave heirs you don't know about, and a rural parcel with no recorded easement may be landlocked even if there's a track running to it. Get a title search before you close, and how heirs' interests get cleared varies by state, so a local closing attorney or title company is the person to ask. Cheap land with a broken chain of title isn't cheap.

monica_tran3 · Answer

Three sales in eighteen months and one is family, so you have two comps. That's not a market, that's an anecdote. Widen to the adjoining counties with similar road access and similar acreage bands before you put a number on anything.

joe_delgado5 · Answer

Don't name a price first is advice from house wholesaling and it travels badly to land. Half these owners genuinely have no idea what the parcel is worth and asking them to guess just stalls the conversation for two weeks.

jessreyes12 · Answer

I had the same confusion about becoming the bank and I'll admit I thought you sold it on terms to the person you bought it from, which makes no sense once you say it out loud. What I still don't get is what happens to your money in the meantime. If you pay $6,000 cash for the dirt and then take $700 down and $200 a month, you're waiting years to get back to even, let alone to buy the next one. Doesn't that mean you can only do one or two before you're out of cash?

tonyv88 · Answer

@compass yes, and that's the whole reason people sell some parcels for cash and only carry paper on others. The cash flips fund the pipeline, the notes are the slow money. On @pike's 12 acres, the $190 tax bill also tells you something useful, that's an assessment low enough that nobody's fighting over this parcel, and it's your holding cost if it sits for a year.

"Just take it off my hands," she wrote. Now what?

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