This episode dissects strategy for a struggling Tennessee infill lot purchased for $35K that’s suffered nine brutal price cuts over six months with minimal buyer interest. The property exemplifies the price-per-acre trap below two acres, compounded by a nosy neighbor torpedoing a $55K deal and tepid COVID-boom market conditions where builder activity is declining and residential inventory is spiking.
Key Takeaways:
- Days-on-Market Reset Technique Taking properties off-market for 5-31 days (depending on MLS rules) resets DOM timers and allows fresh marketing angles including new drone photography to capture seasonal changes.
- Lake Acreage Distorts Pricing Math The 20-acre lake within the 93-acre Tennessee property discussed can’t be counted toward usable land calculations, immediately bumping required exit from $20K to $26K per acre.
- New Photos + Price Drop Combo Combining DOM reset with refreshed drone imagery (winter bare trees to summer greenery) and aggressive pricing ($35K down to $25K range) maximizes chances of movement in difficult markets.
Listen to learn the tactical playbook for rescuing deals that have gone stale on the market without throwing good money after bad.
(Podcast transcript below)
Welcome to Get Serious. I know on Sundays usually we’re doing a mindset session. I wanted to update you on one of our deals though. I just felt it was a bit more pertinent in this case as we just got some up-to-date info on it. Now that we knocked out our absolute auction Tennessee deal against some of the most stressful weeks
of my professional career, crazy, crazy story. can see me report on it in previous podcasts. Also the, get serious newsletter, which is also on our serious land capital website with all our past newsletters. If you want to see how that went down, but because we ended up with a profit on that deal, you know, obviously it was a huge relief, thought we were going to lose tens of thousands of dollars on it. the other problematic.
property in our portfolio is another Tennessee property. Though fortunately our basis on it was far less around 35k compared to 93k. On this one, still a decent amount of capital even if it’s, when we were first starting this business, 35 grand into a deal was like, whoa, that’s huge amount of money to be putting into a
a property here, whereas like now it’s, you know, close to our minimum that we would even consider. But nevertheless, you don’t want to eat a loss if you don’t have to. And, you know, we bought this property when things were a bit slower, like this was right around Christmas of 2024. And, you know, we overreached on this one. So it was an infill lot.
deep rural Tennessee. mean, we’re talking like right in between Nashville and Knoxville. Just not a ton of activity, but we thought, you know, there’s Lakeview for it. We’re getting at an attractive enough price, you know, based on what we were initially seeing with comps and talking with experienced brokers, you know, we could probably list at 70 with a decent chance of selling it there, but you know,
conservatively probably could exit for 55 to 60 K and We’ve just had barely any activity, you know, we We could have lucked out with this. Maybe we traded our luck with bad luck on this one for the Other auction property which was a worthy trade in my opinion, but we did have a buyer come in You a few months into the deal at at 55 K
that was going to be a quick like two week close. And then, know, just this nosy neighbor came out with who knows what type of motives and just said, yeah, this property is not buildable, which is just a lie. Um, and the buyer got scared off. And really since then we’ve had such tepid interest. And like I was looking at our listing, you know, you’ve had nine price cuts. Like it’s just brutal. Um, over these past six months and, know, even some more recent interest the last couple of weeks, you know, the buyers just fell away, even though I’m like, like,
almost trying to give away this property at this point. Like I would basically accept like almost any terms in the deal. And I’ve just tried every possible avenue, calling up local builders. You’ve heard me talk about all this, do the neighbor letters. We’ve posted all across the different Tennessee land groups, different tactics on Facebook marketplace.
Our brokerage group is very, very solid. I really can’t blame them for this one. Usually if there’s a more troublesome property, you might be able to point to the broker. Maybe they’re not that responsive. They haven’t really pushed it appropriately, but the marketing photos are very solid. They’re real professional group. Anytime I’ll text, even though as their incentive to work with us has decreased steadily.
with a lower listing price, like they still respond very, very quickly. And so I don’t think this is a broker issue. Whereas sometimes in the past, maybe like, yeah, it’s time to move on to somebody else. They might be missing calls. That’s not the vibe that I’ve been getting in this. It’s just a really tough market. We just mispriced it. The price that we bought it at probably was going to be close from market value because again, we just, made
just critical error of trusting price per acre below two eight. And we were right at the two acre mark. said, yeah, roughly two acre property and just thought, hey, you know, some of these half acres, some of these quarter acres are going for these prices. Plus we have a little bit more superior characteristics, Lakeview. We can probably bump the price up a little bit more. Even though I remember back when I was first comping this deal, there was another property that was seemingly much more inferior.
No Lakeview much smaller and It was sitting. I think it was active. I don’t know. This has been a while either active or sold but it was like you have 30 grand and I’m like, yeah, that’s a Not the best comp there But I thought we had enough superior characteristics plus from the sizing perspective that it could have performed better Obviously, it wasn’t the case. Yeah, it’s possible. We could have sold it for 55k We had a buyer there and it just bailed
But what can you do that didn’t didn’t actually turn out so you move on? So we had been listing up to you know down to 35 like right at that break even but you know, it’s only break even from a gross perspective when you take a new account commission and This holding costs on the deal You know, we’re probably already three to five K short on our original Purchase price
on the deal and you take into account closing costs and so forth. already in that loss and I’d already been thinking, okay, do we need to try to fire sale this even faster here? Because the way that our business is oriented is usually like we get a profit, like a partner profit payout over roughly a year long period. And we’re anticipating, you know, finalizing our harvest of our portfolio by end of 2025. So,
It wasn’t necessarily hurting us to hold on to this asset for longer compared to if it was just the last remaining asset and like in order for us to profitably get paid out, like we have to move this one before we can close out the vintage, so to speak. So the dynamic was a bit different compared to last year where in order to close out of vintage, we were, we had a similar situation like this 30 K.
by commercial lot that we thought was gonna sell really quick and it just lingered, lingered, lingered and it was preventing our payout for much longer than anticipated. So it was a bit of a different situation. I don’t wanna eat more loss than needed, but again, there’s no guarantee that us sitting on this for longer is going to change the results.
Anymore and who knows what, you know, the macro environment could worsen recessionary risk, et cetera. We don’t know what, could come up. So it’s also like the other is some level of pressure to get things moving. Plus again, it’s an infill lot in a COVID boom area where builder activity is just decreasing downward pricing pressure from the housing perspective. So.
Uh, it’s not something I wanted to sit on that long either. So I was weighing all of this and I was chatting with my partner today and we had used a technique earlier this year for a different infill lot in Georgia. Um, where we took it off the market for a couple of months. Um, this was in the middle of winter and then put it back on and, you know, the start of buying season and we got a new buyer like very, very quickly after that and had a nice profitable exit. Um, for that one, actually an owner financed.
Sale and we just sold a note at table close but still nice profit for us to get out of that one And it also helped reset the days on market timer. So we thought okay, let’s just try doing that again We have like a nasty situation right nine price cuts like it’s brutal for anybody
Chris Duff (08:01)
Sorry, I’m reorienting myself because my recording stopped. So we’re gonna have to splice this in, but it should still work out. Forgive me if there was a little bit of a blip that just happened before these last couple sentences. That’s just what happened in the background. But we soldier on. And I reached out to the brokers about that and said, you know, can we try taking this off the market? I know every area is different.
before you can reset the days on market timer. Some might be a few days, some might be 30 days-ish, usually no longer than 30 days before you might get penalized by the MLS or whatever. So they said they’re currently on three MLSs in the area, which is solid. Yeah, you always wanna be on as many MLSs as possible. And they said, the main one is only five day turnaround to reset the days on market timer.
You know, another one is like 31 days. And so I was asking, okay, is there, should we wait until all the timers are up to post it across all the MLSs again, or can we stagger it, you know, the main one that’s in five days, can we repost it? And, you know, the other one as it comes up, they’re like, yeah, in our experience, you can stagger it. You know, this technique has worked on occasion, like it’s worth a shot.
you know, to reset the timer here. Plus I also inquired, you know, can we do a new set of photos? Again, I would hate throwing more money at a deal that we’re already losing on. But at the same time, like, you know, you got to pull out all the stops to wonder, okay, what else should we try to avoid losing as much money as we can? And so he said, yeah, we could take some more drone photos, 120 bucks. Yeah, that’s pretty nominal. Let’s do it. You know, the first set of photos that we got was done during the winter.
So there wasn’t much foliage around, know, bear trees. So now we can get some greenery around. It’ll just freshen things up from a visual perspective. Let’s try it. I think we did that with that lakefront lot in Georgia as well. As far as strategy, and so, you know, again, credit to this brokerage group. They’re like, yep, we already got this scheduled out a few days from now. Here’s your release form, and here’s like the new form to sign up.
for re-uploading to the MLS, all taken care of within a couple hours. Again, these guys are on top of it. It’s just a really, really difficult property. And they could have given up on it after the first six months. They’re like, yeah, this is just not worth our time anymore to work on this one. Their incentive is super low at this point to do this deal. I’ve tried renegotiating the commission. I think I’m get it down to 4 % compared to the initial 6 % just given we’ve…
really struck out on this deal. And then I was re-looking at comps and there has been some activity within the last few months, even post-trade war, like May 2025 sales. There was a 0.4 acre-ish that sold for about 25,000. I think there was another one that sold for that. It was a more inferior lot. There was a Lake Fund lot that sold for like 45 grand.
than a campground lot nearby. I think so for like 70 or 80. It’s just like a different type of property though, hard to actually consider as a comp. So I’m like, you know, looking at all of the, plus there is an active lot that directly touches ours. It’s a half acre that’s listed for 25K that has not really gotten that much activity and it’s worse position than ours. So I’m more of the opinion at the moment that 25K.
probably will be our bottom here. It’s just, know, it’s gonna be a 10, 12K loss that we’re gonna have to eat. But nevertheless, like we have to get this one to move. And so also when we relist on the MLS, I dropped it another 5K. I’m like, you know, we’ve been listed at 35K or just under 35K for probably another three weeks or these past three weeks and just still nothing has really happened.
Besides like one pretty tepid buyer. So let’s just drop it again. Like we’ve got to figure out where is this market to actually move this thing One way or another and so we’re getting awful close right to You know a half acre that’s worse than ours listed at 25k We’re gonna be very close that price point for four times the the acreage So
you know, just undercutting, trying to stay ahead of the market. Plus we’ll have that fresh days on market timer. We’ll see what happens. But overall, my decision making too is, you know, again, after the trade war happened, the macro just got tougher. And our growth trajectory for this year just had to get reframed a bit is like these much larger deals that we’re doing, you know, the 50 acres and
south of Dallas, Texas, that’s like, you know, near a million dollar deal. And then this other larger, minor subdivide in Louisiana, those are going to drive most returns and setting up our business to the next step that I have a much larger growth expectation for like 2026 and beyond that we’re trying to set up. It’s just like, have to be patient in the meantime and all of these other lower value deals that preferably I’m just not going to be doing anymore.
going forward and we would just have a much, know, obviously I don’t want to lose money on any deals like this one. But just trying to offload and get as much cash back as possible. Like I would be okay just breaking you in on these lower ones if we get good results for those much larger deals. Like that would be a very, very good result for this year in a pretty difficult economy and macro.
So I’m looking at that auction deal that we surprisingly got a profit on. Even if we have to eat a bit of a loss on this other Tennessee deal, like if that equates to a break even across both of those, like that is still a fine result for me because I was expecting to lose money on both by quite a bit. So that would still be a significant win to get out of two of the nastiest properties that we’ve ever held in the history of our business at roughly a
a blended break even. So just to share a bit of my thinking there, how you might look at your own portfolio. Maybe you got some tough ones to move to. I’ve never met a land investor who hasn’t come across a tough situation before or you haven’t been in the game that long. But this is how we’re trying to solve problems. So with that in mind, SeriousLand.Capital for any of your funding needs, Land Daily Diligence Facebook group for zero cost review of your land deals.
and landpricer.ai for the most reliable land pricing tool on the market. Pushing, pushing, pushing on the product side for that. Looking forward to delivering it to you all. Subscribe and share. Talk to you next time. Bye.
