What separates you from the seller is that you bought at a price that survives the hold, and you have a plan for who buys it and how they pay. The absentee owner usually has neither. They didn't choose the parcel, they don't know the market, and they have no path to a buyer, so the annual bill is pure loss. You chose it, and you know a rural parcel can take months rather than weeks to sell, so you priced that in.
Where people do become the motivated seller is by getting the entry price wrong on the assumption that marketing will be quick. If you paid a number that only works on a 60 day sale and the parcel takes fourteen months, the taxes are the small part. Your capital is the expensive part, because it can't go into the next deal. That's the same math with seller financing, where your money is committed for years by design, so the sizing question is how many parcels you can carry before you're out of cash.
On your reframing of the letter, cancellation is a real motivator, and it's also why some of these parcels come with problems attached. An owner desperate to be rid of something sometimes has a reason beyond the bill: no legal access, a shared driveway nobody wants to talk about, an unresolved estate with heirs who never signed anything, a wetland determination. The discount and the defect often arrive together. Confirm access and title before you close, and how heirs' property and easement claims get resolved varies by state, so that's a local attorney's question rather than a spreadsheet's.
One underrated advantage you have that the seller didn't: you can improve the parcel's salability cheaply. A survey, a cleared entrance, a mowed path, and a recorded easement can move a parcel from unsellable to ordinary for a few thousand dollars.
