This episode dissects a two-acre Tennessee property with lake views that’s dropped from a $70K listing to $39.9K after six months without selling despite aggressive marketing and pricing adjustments. The analysis reveals critical mistakes in per-acre pricing assumptions and uncovers how incorrect sold comps attached to Zillow listings create black marks that tank buyer interest, with a $22K false sale from 2023 making the current pricing appear grossly inflated despite representing a 43% discount from the original list.
Key Takeaways:
- Per-Acre Pricing Fails Below 2-3 Acres Raw trading prices matter more than per-acre calculations for small parcels—half-acre to two-acre lots trade in similar absolute dollar ranges regardless of acreage differences, making per-acre premiums irrelevant.
- Zillow Address Assignments Create False Comp History Generic street addresses without numbers can attach previous sales of different properties to your listing, requiring early detection and immediate broker intervention to reassign addresses and remove black marks.
- Slow Markets Punish Property Characteristic Premiums Lake views and superior features don’t justify significant pricing bumps in slow markets—when half-acre inferior lots sell for $30-35K, a two-acre property can’t command double regardless of advantages.
Listen to the full episode to hear how multiple compounding errors created a six-month listing nightmare.
(Podcast transcript below)
Hi, Chris Duff over at Serious Land Capital, Vacant Land funding partner as I…
rip my mic out of the desk. So today wanted to talk about yet more lessons regarding, you know, just pitch perfect listing strategies. Again, I’ve been doing this a while and I just feel like there’s, you know, constantly other mistakes that we could have fixed or things that might not be obvious until
You know, something is not going quite the direction that we would have liked. so I wanted to touch on that Lakeview Tennessee property that we own. know I’ve remarked on this one a lot. This is like the number one property that is just giving me concern within our portfolio. I mean, we listed this right before new years of last year. Still hasn’t sold. had one offer that, the buyer bailed within.
A couple days of going under contract and now we’re approaching like half the listing price of what we initially listed at. So it was a 35 K by we had a preference built in to give us an extra five K of profit upside. If it sold below 70,000, we listed at 70 steadily have dropped it now to 39.9 as of today.
Um, such limited interest. I’ve made a ton of cold calls, tried like every possible marketing avenue in the book here. Um, you know, solid realtor group, very responsive, just, you know, really nothing going on. Um, and so I was reviewing this property again and I know I remarked a couple of weeks ago where, you know, we uncovered a nasty error with
different Tennessee property that we have the 25 acres that’s actually going up for absolute auction tomorrow. So that one I’m actually feeling a bit more confident with. Yeah, knock on wood. Never know how actions will go. But in that other property, we had myths that it was listed twice within the last couple of years and didn’t sell. And so
You know, I know I shared, okay, here’s a different strategy on how we could attempt to search for every possible variation of a certain land property that might have been listed, but didn’t sell. and so, you know, might be hidden from the various MLS site search engines, but could still get hits on Google. So again, it’s a little bit tricky, but you know,
That’s our fault. should have noted it. We’re solving that problem as it is. So this other Tennessee property that’s roughly two acres and a whole bunch of price cuts already that we’ve done, obviously doesn’t look good. But I’m looking at the history. It seemed to indicate that there was a sale of the property in 2023 for like 22 grand.
Uh, but I’m like, there’s no way we made this mistake again. We really missed this. I, you know, it had been, you know, half a year since I diligence this property. So I went back to the property records and everything. It’s like, okay, that definitely wasn’t the case. That’s an incorrect. Sold price. It actually sold for 44,000 back in 2007, which also wasn’t a great, I mean, those mid two thousands prior to GFC, you know, a lot of inflated prices. So, um,
Yeah, but at the same time, it’s been almost 20 years. So it’s, it’s tough to keep any of those numbers in perspective, but I’m like, okay, well, at least I didn’t make that mistake again. Our diligence panned out. And in this case, okay. They showed as a true sold comp. Um, so that would have appeared in engines if we actually went back, you know, uh, a couple of years, but again, the issue with listing land sometimes is if you’re just.
You know, it doesn’t have a signed street address more often than not. So the, you know, especially you get very little control on, on Zillow. mean, Zillow is basically even for agents. mean, they really shifted their business model to really interact with agents. If you’re a for sale by owner, the customer service is horrible. I forget about it. and this was even, you know, four or five years ago. And my understanding, even, talking to agents now is like, even for them.
Operating with Zillow is just a black box for the most part really hard to get things changed But you know, it’s a huge platform that gets a ton of views. So like you kind of have to to work with it And they oftentimes will assign you a Certain address associated with the property, but the risk is if you’re using just a generic address like in this case You know, it didn’t even have a number. It was just you know, the name of the street and You know, whatever the town is
So sometimes, especially if it’s in an area that might have other land that’s sold, it can pick up previous properties on that street and treat them as the same listing, which can make previous sales and so forth a lot more difficult to sort out unless you’re actually going to the official records. And so that previous sale in 2023 wasn’t actually our property.
but it still looks bad because it’s attached to our listing now. So, you know, if some random person looks at it or even other buy side agent, you know, they’re not necessarily going to be sophisticated enough to go back and check the previous sales history. Yeah, I’d say like 1 % of people will actually do that. You know, they’re just going to look at the listings. Oh, wow. You know, two years ago, this thing sold for 22,000. These guys are trying to sell for big premium here. Like it’s just not a good look.
And then there was history going back for I don’t know another 10 15 years beyond that And so You know again, that’s something I wish I would have caught even earlier before it’s a little late in the game I mean, it’s just so many things obviously would not have purchased property in retrospect. It’s just damage control at this point and You know going forward
I’m not even sure how we could necessarily have caught this prior. I’m still trying to indicate to my team, like, okay, we already have the strategy for if we were to try to find some previous listing, plug in every variation possible. So I would still do that to even under uncover previous sold listings.
That might just pop up and get assigned to a certain property, but I’m not sure that’s always going to be a hundred percent hit So I think the strategy Generally would be first. We have to be way earlier not you know five months into the game of listing this property Is if we notice okay, there’s some Kind of black mark previous listing history, especially a recent sale that was like way lower that’s not accurate, but it’s attached to the listing weird
Ask the broker. Okay. Yeah. Contact Zillow. We got to figure this out. Try to reassign a street address. So it’s just a clean listing to avoid that black mark. That would be a preferred strategy to do right off the bat is just have, you know, be paying more attention to that. It’s better late than never. I’m going to actually reach out to those guys and see, can we just update this? It looks bad.
So that’s just something to keep in mind there for, again, this all operates differently. It might show up on Zillow or Redfin. They’re not always one-to-one in terms of how previous listing history might show up. But that is another thing you should really be paying attention to that when I was looking at this, like, man, it’s just.
It’s just another thing that went wrong with this property that has just been a growing pain in the neck that, yeah, I’m just banging my head against the wall trying to offload here. Also at the same time, and this is a reminder for myself, I’ve made this mistake in the past.
is, and you know, clearly didn’t learn my lesson quite as well from this side either, is that you really have to be careful with per acre pricing for anything below roughly two to three acres on average, because at that type of acreage, just the raw trading prices for what properties are going for are going to be more important compared to
what the actual acreage or whatever the per acre price range is. In more simple terms, means that if you’re, especially in kind of an infill area, like a half acre lot might go for the same price as a three quarter acre lot or a one acre lot or even a one and a half acre lot because the per acreage
pricing is just less important on average, for properties of that size. And so we thought, Hey, you know, we have a roughly two acre piece here. that also has Lakeview. Like it just seemed more advantageous. We thought there were more positive characteristics to it, but that that’s also a risk. Like teaching myself again, like price and whatever is trading in the area.
is always the most important factor. Property characteristics is secondary. It’s a close second, but you have to consider pricing even more. well, let me take that back. Certain characteristics will matter more than others. Like if it’s just covered with wetlands or something like something that’s vastly inferior, that’s going to matter more than like what’s actually trading. But if you’re
have a fairly average property, maybe a, you know, okay, Lake view, but not on the Lake. It gets nice, but it’s not just a wildly superior trophy type of characteristic. That’s like, obviously going to increase the value of the property significantly compared to other properties. And if it’s a relatively slow market anyway, you just have to be careful about, thinking I can bump up the pricing.
just because I think I have a few advantages here, even if they’re true. you have to go by the pricing. And so I was relooking again at these comps and. Yeah, there were certain half acres or roughly acre properties that were going for, and they might’ve even been a little bit more inferior selling like for 30 to 35,000. And so our expectation is self or potentially double that.
was just mistaken. And again, I’ve made that mistake before. just, you know, obviously kicking myself again. This is just another, you know, make the same mistake twice. Like you’re a true fool at that point. And, know, just got to deal with it. It’s the scars are even deeper with this in mind. And so again, that’s just a reminder. Okay. Like our two acre difference was really not that important for what
the market was saying parcels of this relative acre range was actually trading for. So I feel like we’re getting close to a bottom here. I mean, you can only get that close to zero dollars to actually sell a property, right? Like at some point you’re going to find a market and looking at these other previous comps, again, I would say this more difficult macro. I would be surprised if this thing sells for lower than 30. And now the same brokerage representing our property is
adding a contiguous half acre property this Friday, so two days from now, that should prove advantageous for our property too, because it lets a possible buyer have access to two different roadways. So it makes the whole parcel a full two and a half acres if they were to buy both of them. But they’re pricing that half acre at 25,000.
And that’s like a roughly 50, 50 K per acre pricing. Whereas with our price cut, we’re now at 20 K per acre. So it’s huge variation from a per acreage range, but in terms of what might be a tradable parcel, that probably just won’t matter quite as much. you know, it’s, know, if they think they can move this at 25 K, obviously these brokers are like, Hey, we have this other parcel right next to it.
just been getting killed, they probably would not within good conscience list that other one too high. So if we’re at just below 40 now for 4X the size of the property with better views, I don’t know. It stands to reason that it’s going to be advantageous that we’re going to stick out even more plus have that other property behind it.
and we’ll see how this performs over the coming days. So just want to share those couple lessons with you all about this property here. I’ll obviously keep you updated as soon as we find a way to exit this thing and hopefully avoid these mistakes that we made as well. that, SeriousLand.Capital for any of your funding needs, zero cost.
due diligence at land daily diligence Facebook group and landpricer.ai. I’m to get started on more work there right now. Remember landunconference.com $200 off your ticket for August 7th through 9th. Use my last name for the promo code and subscribe and share. See you tomorrow. Take care. Bye.
