hunting property / land question

[cjppjc]

Re: hunting property / land question

A few hints for you:

-- Do your homework on comps.
-- Carefully look at pricing trends in your area.
-- Look at trends for the number of similar properties on the market, taking seasonality into account. In general, the more that are on the market, the harder they will be to move.
-- Find out about REOs and foreclosures in the area. If there have been a lot of them, they can depress values for a long time and make property harder to move.
-- Find out how long the property has been on the market, and whether there have been any price reductions already.
-- Sellers will be more inclined to accept a lower price if the property has been on the market a while at the same price. Offering 10% below asking after 3 months isn't unreasonable.
-- Your offer should be no more than about 15% below asking price. Anything less and the seller will probably just relist at a lower price rather than accept, so you're just wasting everyone's time.
-- What the other person paid is immaterial. How much they're going to make on the deal has no bearing on what it's worth, and if you bring it up in a negotiation you're just going to insult them.
-- Paying all cash doesn't help you. What does help is if you can present an unconditional offer that can close quickly.

Yes to all the above. On raw land comps are so important. The point made about insulting the owner is the beginning of the adversarial relationship. With raw land you don't need as much cooperation with the seller as you would if you were buying a house.

[cardplayer1]

Re: hunting property / land question

I asked this question before:

Why does it matter what the owner paid for the land?

[QUOTE
I'm not sure what you mean by "leaving out the middle man."[/QUOTE]

Buying directly from the owner of the land was what I was talking about....

It kind of looked like guys were buying and flipping a bunch of properties in a few cases, but I don't really know. It's possible they were just real estate agents that were listing multiple properties.

[cjppjc]

Re: hunting property / land question

[QUOTE
I'm not sure what you mean by "leaving out the middle man."

Buying directly from the owner of the land was what I was talking about....

It kind of looked like guys were buying and flipping a bunch of properties in a few cases, but I don't really know. It's possible they were just real estate agents that were listing multiple properties.[/quote]


It sounds to me like when you know about financing, you should the seek out a licenced real estate agent in the area your interested in. If the properties you mentioned are listed, It really doesn't matter who owns it. If you like it, and you and your agent can figure out the range of fair value ,you might end up being a landowner. If that thought scares you, you should stop this.