A transmission line that kills residential value can be the only thing worth paying for on a different use

Take a raw land scenario worth studying: 41 acres at the edge of a small city, priced as future residential lots, rough ground, one road frontage, a transmission line cutting the back corner that gets treated as a nuisance because nobody builds a house under it and it eats into the buildable lot count. During a due diligence period, a competing buyer sometimes shows up offering well more than double the contract price, cash, with a short look period on something they cannot fully describe upfront. In cases like this the buyer often turns out to be an energy or site developer, and the thing being evaluated is that same transmission line, along with the distance to the nearest substation. A residential underwriting treats the line as value lost. An energy or infrastructure buyer treats the line as the only thing on the property actually worth paying for, since proximity to existing transmission and substation capacity is scarce and valuable for certain uses. The practical lesson: on any raw land, finding out what runs across the property and how far it sits from the nearest substation costs nothing and can materially change what the highest and best use actually is. It rarely changes the plan for a standard residential flip, but once that check becomes part of the routine, it is hard to underwrite land without doing it.