This episode details a 55-acre East Coast flip that generated $200,000 gross profit in under 60 days, purchased at $160,000 and sold at $360,000 cash. The property featured a pond, creek, mature timber, favorable building terrain, nearby new construction, and unusually strong comp activity for larger acreage ($150K-$200K+), with timing that avoided Hurricane Helene damage by one day and benefited from post-election economic momentum.
Key Takeaways:
- Larger Acreage Trading Routinely Signals Strong Market Multiple recent sold comps of 20-40+ acre parcels at high absolute values ($200K+) indicated robust buyer pools willing to pay premium prices, justifying parent parcel sale over subdivide risk.
- Conservative Underwriting Protects High-Capital Deals Properties above $150,000 require greater percentage spreads between purchase and exit due to diminished buyer pools—this deal’s 2.25x potential exit versus 1.6x actual still delivered $85,000 net after splits.
- Multiple Value Drivers Compound Deal Quality Pond, creek, timber value, utilities at street, superior terrain, and recent comparable activity created rare confluence where every evaluation angle confirmed exceptional opportunity justifying aggressive pricing.
Hear the full case study breakdown including Hurricane Helene near-miss timing, realtor selection strategy, and why certain deals justify immediate aggressive capital deployment.
(Podcast transcript below)
Hey, Chris Duff over at Serious Land Capital, vacant land funding partner. Today, I’m going to tell you a bit about how we made $200,000 on a recent flip in just under 60 days. So this is definitely one of the best deals we’ve ever participated in. some of the characteristics were just
Screaming towards us. Hey, we think this one’s going to be very favorable to us so the actual underlying asset was along the East Coast of the US and a bit more of a rural area But between some you know population centers and it was 55 acres
And usually when you see acreage that large, you start to think, based on some of the road frontage, we could consider subdividing, maybe bump up our price per acre a little bit potentially on this one. When we took a look at that though, just the way the parcel was oriented, it didn’t…
quite make as much sense to split the parcel because there was a pond that was nearly along the road or about half of the road frontage and so it would made it bit awkward to carve up the parcel. I might have made one of the child parcels a bit more valuable than the other. So that was
something that deterred us a little bit there and I know I’ve remarked on that and I remark in it all the time is that if you’re thinking about doing possible subdivide, you really have to assess the underlying characteristics of each part of the parent parcel because your risk of adverse selection can be extremely large if you don’t take into account some parts of the parent parcel being much more positive or negative than other carve outs and so that
any perceived appreciation that you’re building in just by reducing your acreage. Because again, usually the rule is smaller the acreage, the higher the price per acre. But you take the risk of longer days on market or reducing your perceived price per acre for child parcel acreage if you have adverse selection that comes into play. So we thought there was a chance of that.
And even though the underlying parent parcel had significant road frontage that could have justified some, some carve outs there. And then when we were diligent seeing the comps in the area, it was quite unusual that you were getting significant number of sold comps like very recent, know, within the past three.
know, max of six months approximately that were of similar sized acreage. So we’re talking 20, 30, 40 acre plus that we’re actually more routinely selling on the market compared to smaller acreage. So that’s not that common in many markets to see, you know, larger acreage trading much more routinely.
versus carved up child parcels and for significant dollar values. Again, usually if you get north of $150,000, $200,000 in price for individual land parcels, your buyer pool tends to start drying up a bit more. But in this particular area, there seemed to be a very strong buyer pool even recently that were buying properties north of a few hundred thousand dollars.
So that made us feel more favorable about us picking up the underlying asset and not doing additional work to it. We got a survey on it, but not carving it up into other child parcels because it didn’t look like the price per acre was really going to accelerate much beyond what we could get conservatively.
with the parent parcel and our price for the parent parcel was still going to be roughly half of what we thought we could conservatively exit the asset for. And it had a lot going for it too in relation to some of those other comps. It’s 50 acres, just outside of city limits of
You’re not a major city or anything, but you know, a township that wasn’t, you know, completely rink-a-dink, you know, had probably, I’m just estimating maybe 5,000 plus some people within the population there. Like, not crazy small, you sometimes you pass towns and you see the signs and they’re like, yeah, population 20, 30 people. Yeah, not quite like that.
but yeah, really nice acreage, just outside of city limits, plus having, readily available electricity, water, public water access, no, no sewer, but that’s not unusual, especially for such a large asset like that. And the terrain was very favorable for building as well. You know, very slightly rolling.
but mostly flat for the most part. yeah, like a very nice pond and a creek that was more along the edge of the property. So it wouldn’t prevent much building. And it was also a good setup for potential hunters, which was an attractive point for various buyers and a more routine feature for properties that we.
Comped on on the market prior plus there was underlying timber value not not a ton but it does Serve as an asset to To properties that you look at if okay that there is mature timber, you know, even if it’s, know $10-20,000 worth still something that could be of interest to to end buyers here and just opening up
possible buyer pools, you know, beyond a residential, recreational, possible commercial usage for timbering the property. So all of those avenues really made us feel more comfortable with the asset and having such a
significant volume of more recent sold comps and being able to undercut the active comps in terms of price per acre with the price that we were purchasing the property for. So this was a really sizable purchase, 160 grand out. And that was just for the underlying asset. was eventually baked in an extra 5,500 in survey cost.
But outside of that we didn’t spend anything else for the property. We had a good realtor who was extremely active in the area. Her father also ran a local timber company, so he was able to help assess more from marketable timber as well. And this area, interestingly,
the week before we bought it, even I think the day before we were anticipating to close that that’s when that really unfortunate hurricane Helene was flying through much of the East Coast. And it actually delayed closing a bit because the local tile company got hit so hard, their electricity all was out and there was a lot of damage within the county that we purchased this property. But very, very fortunately, the
street that we bought this property on it, it somehow didn’t get touched. And, you know, the trees weren’t all ripped out and electricity was fine and everything. So we got extremely fortunate from, you know, force majeure, Act of God type event. know, literally the day before we were anticipated to close, you know, if we already had money out and the hurricane kind of wrecked things up, it could have been
much different story here, but the timing fortunately worked in our favor. And then once we listed the property, it very quickly started attracting interest, site visits routinely were occurring. And we were actually a little bit more aggressive on pricing in terms of pricing.
a bit less conservatively, just because we thought and consulting with the broker, we okay, we can leave some room for negotiation. This is probably going to be a pretty attractive asset. have, you know, maybe 50K plus to work with that, you know, based on our list price, which we started out at 400,000 that we’d be happy, you know, almost $100,000 spread from there if we could move it relatively quickly. And
within the month, multiple different visits. And I forget how many offers might have come in that, but it was getting so much activity that it’s just one of those like, okay, yeah, we definitely have an attractive asset here. As long as I’m getting site visits and calls, I’m usually feeling pretty good about where things are going from for a Dispo.
perspective and we had also listed this, think just prior to the election, the general election as well. And I know there was like maybe a two week bump within the economy after and it’s so hard to say how long-term things can happen, but sometimes those macro factors can play.
play a role within the underlying micro economies that we operate in as land investors. So it probably helped us. We probably still would have been fine regardless of the outcome there. But all these confluence of factors probably led to a more favorable result for us. And ultimately we got a $360,000
cash offer and I mean cash in terms of there was a third party lender involved, but yeah, we consider those cash offers just because us as the asset holders still get paid out cash at the time of closing, you know, assuming the buyer has the proof of funds and all that. So I’m very happy to take a third party lender associated deals.
And you’re rarely gonna have folks who are just paying out straight cash, especially above $200,000 value. So, you know, so we got another contract very quickly in about a month and exited very shortly thereafter before the end of last year, right before Christmas.
It was really nice way to end the year for us. And ultimately, after taking into account commissions and some closing expenses and then splitting profits with the investor who brought us the deal, we ended up with a 1.52 gross multiple on our invested capital. So basically that
equated to us truly taking home 85,000 net of expenses and profit sharing here. absolutely outstanding outcome. Those deals are few and far between to find. It was just one of those when every time we were checking the various comps and underlying characters, like, this one is.
Looking very favorable. At the end of the day, land can be tough, especially those higher valuations. We haven’t had the best luck in the past of buying above 150,000 before and usually reducing your buyer pool have to be more conservative. And if things can go wrong at that amount of capital outlay, they can go wrong very, very quickly. But in this case, it was extremely favorable. Hard to imagine it going any better than that.
and gave us a lot more firepower and dry powder to work with heading into this year. hopefully that gives you an idea on what we look for in regard to the land assets and what’s going to be most favorable for us. I’ll share more. We have hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of deals that we’ve looked at.
infinite lessons that we’ve learned, but I wanted to share this one in your own land investing journey and looking forward to coming back again here tomorrow. Again, if you’re looking for funding, SiriusLand.Capital, zero cost review of your land deals, land daily diligence, Facebook group on Mondays and Thursdays, and the landpricer.ai for the most accurate and simple way to value land in the U.S.
Finally, Unconference in August with Dave Denniston. You can use my last name, D-U-F-F, for $200 off your ticket. You just have to apply on the Unconference website so long as you’re making at least six figures in annual revenue, you’ll make it in. I will hope to see you there and feel free to use that discount upon hearing this and looking forward to next time. Bye.
