This episode tackles listing strategy in hyper-saturated markets like Lee County and Cape Coral, Florida, where cookie-cutter lots offer minimal differentiation and buyer choice overwhelms seller advantages. The discussion emphasizes pricing as the dominant factor in markets experiencing COVID boom corrections, with Florida properties showing the steepest year-over-year housing price declines nationally and corresponding land market pressure from distressed investor inventory.
Key Takeaways:
- Beat the Absolute Lowest Comp by a Significant Margin In saturated markets with dozens of active listings, matching or slightly undercutting the bottom isn’t enough—list at $30K when the low end clusters at $34-35K to generate real attention and fast movement.
- Marketing Photos Are Sub-5% of Value Drone photography and professional listings help differentiation, but price dominates everything in cookie-cutter markets where property characteristics offer negligible competitive advantage.
- Macro Factors Compound Saturated Market Risk Florida’s housing correction creates cascading pressure as overleveraged investors dump inventory, reducing builder demand and buyer activity while increasing sell-side pressure on already crowded land markets.
Listen to the full episode for the complete strategy on winning in red ocean land markets.
(Podcast transcript below)
All right. Good afternoon. Chris Duff over at Serious Land Capital, Vacant Land Funding Partner. Just got off a super efficient land daily diligence session, probably reviewed.
10 plus properties. Some of them were obviously easier than others, but there was a million dollar plus subdivide within there that took a good chunk of time and wanted to remark on another topic that just bears, you know, I’ve done so many of these podcasts. Sometimes I forget whether I’ve, you know, maybe tangentially targeted a certain topic, but you know, it just bears worth.
competing because you see it so often. But in some of these very saturated markets, know, Finkeley, Charlotte County, Florida, or other infill markets where there’s just a ton of both sold and active comps, like actual ratios are probably pretty good. It’s probably usually going to be more.
favored towards active properties compared to ones that are selling. But yeah, there’s definitely activity there. People are always hunting for deals. You got to be really careful about how you position those properties and what you list them for. There’s virtually no distinguishing features that you can count on for certain properties that you have in that area.
Maybe you have like a slightly larger lot might be a corner lot, but there’s just not that much differentiation. Maybe some have little less vegetation than others. But on average, they are extremely cookie cutter. And so then you’re just playing a game of wondering, okay, you know, are there any sellers that are going to potentially choose your property versus others when there’s such
a confluence of choice and many of those properties, some you might be able to beat out on marketing. You know, some realtors or listings will be just super lazy with just some basic aerial map photos, property boundaries. So you could take like nicer drone photos and so forth. That’s going to help a bit as well. But like I’ve remarked a number of times, know, marketing photos are
They’ll help you stand out, but they are sub 5 % of the actual value that you’re going to drive with your property. Mostly it’s going to be price first and foremost. The next it’ll be property characteristics. And then after that, it’s kind of the, you know, how much lipstick are you actually putting on the property as an additive factor to stand out.
So in situations like these, there’s just, you you might see some sold comps that are like, you know, let’s say it’s a market in Lee County, Cape Coral, which by the way, if you’re paying attention to the housing market across the country, that’s had some of the most year over year decline in housing prices.
around the country, like Florida overall, it’s probably the worst hit state on average right now. It’s spreading to other COVID boom markets. I mean, I’m here in Austin and we’ve had like the largest price correction out of any city for homes over the last three years, like 20 % than any other city in the U.S. here. was, you know, like long-term prospects are still really good here, but yeah, it it rose up way too quickly.
And you know that that’s what tends to happen when when there’s such rapid booms in certain industries that you’re gonna get a correction So we saw that here and we’re seeing that in a lot of other place around the country particularly like these more significant flipping states both from homes and Land and land doesn’t always correlate one-to-one with housing prices, but you know if you’re gonna be buying land in an area where Builders are really running into trouble or investors who?
you know, bought homes and they’re not able to rent as well. You know, all of sudden they’re carrying a mortgage on a property. Uh, and, um, yeah, the, valuation of their, uh, house goes down considerably all of a sudden, that, um, creates a huge pressure point for these investors. They might just be looking to sell and move on from their inventory. Uh, and then there’s going to be less activity correspondingly for the land market. If, you know,
People won’t necessarily want to build as much anymore. And you’re just getting more and more sell side pressure with people trying to exit. Um, and things can get hairy really quickly. So that’s just something to keep in mind in these areas, even outside of just the raw land characteristics in and of themselves that you want to familiarize yourself with. But yeah, I mean, you might see some sold comps that, you know, getting back to it could be going for, I don’t know, 45, 50 K and you’re like, okay, I’m
may as well list my property there. But when you really look at how many properties are listed and how many actually sold and how long things were on market and so forth, yeah, there might be a couple outliers that just randomly sold much quicker at a higher price point, but are you really going to count on that? That is a huge gamble in my estimation. So in any of these areas like this, where there’s so little room to differentiate yourself in such high saturation, I just want to beat
the lowest possible, well not possible, but lowest sold comp that was ideally as recent as possible. Look at the pending comps, can I beat all of those? And what is also active on the market? Can I beat all of those? And usually you’re gonna be sitting around the same price point, especially in saturated markets like this. So, for instance, okay, yeah, maybe on the high end, some of these are moving like for 45, 50K potentially, but I see really on the low end.
Yeah, it’s closer to like 34, 35 K that are both listed properties or more recent sold comps that seem to be kind of more of the bottom of the market and their characteristics aren’t that different from what then the property that you might have. Then I want to beat that out. And are you going to beat that out by a sliver or, you know, by a decent chunk? If you list something at 30 K, you’re going to get some real attention.
Just knowing that other people might be more comfortable sitting on the market or maybe they have less margin to work with in the first place. But if you’re really looking to move something, you got to take a big step in that direction to just race toward the bottom. I don’t like markets like that, but if you want to win at them, like that is the strategy to do that. So, you you’re more protected against downward shifts in purchasing.
in the area and all those other various macro factors that I mentioned even outside of the land industry writ large and Especially if you’re buying, know the property outright You really don’t want to get squeezed in direction like that and at those type of price points You’re gonna have less realtor Interest in you know lower cost deals where they can earn a decent margin on it competing against a lot of other
Agents to move properties like it’s just it’s messy as our super red ocean Markets to operate in but again if you want to win take a big step below the absolute lowest prices that you see both from the sold pending and active side Especially sold and pending with all of that in mind if you’re looking for funding serious land capital
Facebook group which I just mentioned just got off of. We’re gonna be coming back to Tuesday after Memorial Day here just FYI and landpricer.ai I’ve got to go get some more work here we are gunning to get this thing released within the next month. Gotta keep sprinting. With that subscribe and share. Landunconference.com of course $200 off your ticket with my last name. Take care see you tomorrow. Bye.
