This episode dissects a rural Illinois property purchased under $60K that generated competing offers including a $140K contingent bid and a $127.5K cash close, demonstrating tactical negotiation during a compressed timeline with limited comparable sales. The deal succeeded despite broker caution about slow local land markets and significant comp variance requiring 10+ mile search radius.
Key Takeaways:
- Pre-log multiple site visits before accepting initial offers Same-day activity signals hot properties; requesting highest-and-best from multiple prospects creates bidding pressure rather than accepting first reasonable offer.
- Cash offers with one-week closes beat higher contingent offers by $12.5K Thirty-day house-sale contingencies in slow markets carry extreme risk; immediate certainty justifies accepting lower but guaranteed proceeds.
- Verify exact acreage against county records to prevent $1,500 shortfalls Buyers may calculate on different square footage; confirming recorded acreage ensures full contracted value without last-minute disputes.
The full episode walks through the complete negotiation sequence from initial skepticism through final contract, proving 2X margin deals still exist for disciplined operators.
(Podcast transcript below)
Welcome to Get Serious excited to be reporting on this one today. So, um, yeah, I know a lot of folks are, you know, always mentioning, Hey, just a compressed margins, difficult to find deals. Um, you know, even finding, you know, 60, 70 cents on a dollar, hard, hard enough to find, uh, uh, qualified deals, let alone, um, you know
properties that are half of a conservative, you know, 2X margin. But we’re still finding those, you know, definitely tougher to find, but you know, that’s what we’re still tracking on. We’ve built a sizable business with great margins by focusing on those deals. And here’s another case study, not fully closed yet, but it’s basically a done deal.
So this was a deal in Illinois. Rural property and the buy price was just under 60 grand. You know, 20 plus acre property. So the purchase price per acre, I want to say, was
Yeah, a little shy of three grand an acre, maybe close to like two seven, two seven five, something like that. So ideally we would want to be getting an exit of like five five ish, know, fifty five hundred per acre roughly.
And, know, was just seemingly a distressed property sale. Again, it’s all those same usual suspects when you can, you know, find folks who are, you know, in the midst of an airship situation or, you know, some other type of financial difficulty or, you know, family transition, whatever.
Like those still tend to be the best sellers to work with. And in this case, you know, there was a mortgage on the property. think they bought it a few years ago, had plans to move there and just fell through. And, you know, it was a decently like cleared property. It could be farmland, but wasn’t actively farmed. Could even have some hunting land in the back.
of the property as well. And, you know, the comp situation was interesting. It seemed to point in the direction that we could get, you know, roughly 5,500 per acre, but, you know, significant variance and there wasn’t, you know, a tremendous amount of comps being available.
within that market, you we had to expand out our search radius pretty significantly, you know, 10 ish some odd miles. And, you know, I really don’t like using sold comps in this market prior to, you know, early April of 2025. And, you know, it just it wasn’t it was encouraging enough, but it wasn’t like a slam dunk that
We were gonna for sure get to X margin on this and talking with a local realtor who is very informative. He’s done a lot of deals in the area and he’s like, yeah. And that’s the thing too. I talk a lot more about, know, trying to do more deals in the Midwest and the Northeast part of the country because that just tends to be performing better more recently compared to, more of the typical land flipping States in the South and the West.
But in this particular area of Illinois, and Illinois in a lot of, you know…
kind of statistical analysis of the housing market, like it is one of, if not the top performing state in the country in terms of price appreciation. The realtor is like, yeah, this has been a rough year for land, at least in that particular area, which again is always a key reminder. Real estate is hyper local. You have to go zip code by zip code, street by street in order to figure out the right value. Bottom up data is always going to be better than top down.
Nevertheless, like the macro indicators seem to be positive there. But again, the bottom up was like not really matching and the realtor is like, you know, it’s, he thought, you know, five ish K per acre probably would be more reliable for a conservative estimate. It’s possible we could be sitting on the land for a while, maybe closer to 4,500 per acre.
You know, and to me, it’s always like downside, downside, downside scenario. Okay. We’re buying just a little shy of 3k per acre. Is there any chance we’d lose money on this deal? Accounting for commission and closing costs, et cetera. And there really didn’t seem to be a case there. There was one comp that sold earlier this year for 3k per acre, but it really seemed to be a distress sale. Um, like, I mean, it went pending within two days, uh, had pretty poor road frontage. had an old.
house that needed foundation work and a mobile home on it. So like it was a bit more of a unique situation. You know, it’s much more wooded than the property that we were looking at. So it was tough to put stock into that one as much compared to a number of other comps that seemed to be bumping the price a bit higher. So that one was a bit of an outlier, but nevertheless, we, and even though that was like the
You know comp with The lowest price per acre on it like it was still a bit higher than our buy price So like that gave us some extra downside protection there So, you know, we went back to the originator who brought us the deal and like, you know 57 You know 57 5 purchase price here like if we could get this closer to 50k maybe 55
It would just, it would, make us feel a lot better about this one. Cause like the market and talking to the realtor, really grilling him on it. Like it, it just felt like we were a bit off when we were considering the conservatives. Like, you know, maybe we could get the 55 possibly. And this was before he visited it. Actually, when he went to go visit, he was like, yeah, I think this is more of a premium property. We probably can get the 55. So that was more encouraging.
And ultimately we did decide to do that deal because again, we thought it was downside protected enough and That we were able to rearrange the terms a bit more to In our opinion give us a little bit more protection for Working through this deal and they were had already been a problem with it before like title was taking a while and another funder had backed out of the deal
cause they got into a capital crunch or something like that. So, you know, there, there were a couple of things behind the scenes that were a little bit trickier. That didn’t really affect the pricing as much, but, know, it came to us kind of suddenly and, you know, relatively close timeline to work with to close. you we had to adjust accordingly. and so we ended up purchasing the property and, know, again, there was a mortgage on the property. I’m.
seller walked away with like 1k in takeaway proceeds after paying off the mortgage. So again, like seemingly a bit more of a distressed sale there. And we immediately listed over this last weekend, or maybe it was fully up on just Monday of this week, so like a couple days.
Prior to when I’m recording this and just immediately like it’s great when it works out this way I get just it’s rare but especially in today’s market, but sometimes it does and yeah, the marketing was great, you know quality of the photo is excellent but there was a buyer who owned like 400 acres of farmland right near the property they wanted to start or you know, they made a
initial cash offer verbally for 5k per acre, which, you know, was solid, but you know, we had just listed it. Let’s start feeling it out. Plus there was like going to be another site visit scheduled that day, like same day that it was being listed or actually it was the following day after that. It’s been kind of a whirlwind back and forth with this deal. So you’re like, okay, there’s at least some initial attention on this one.
Let’s see what What we can put together that’s always always a great sign right off the bat you’re getting getting some activity there and so for the 5k cash buyer and they were like an ASAP close like hey We can use same title company closing like, know a week You know, it’s a great thing to have in mind to me when I see those scenarios And where there’s some initial activity and it’s like freshly listed
then usually the tactic is hey, just meet in the middle somewhere. We were listed at 6K per acre. So most times it would be like, okay, meet at 55, maybe hack a little bit more. But usually early on when we’re starting to get some initial activity and we’re not sure how the market’s gonna pan out, I would anchor bit higher. So it’s like, okay, if he wants to close fast, do 57.50 per acre.
And we’d be willing to sign a contract for that the Offer or the buyer for that particular cash offer came back and they’re like, okay 54 Is what we will offer on the property To me I was like, you know, that’s basically right there It’s right at the 2x number, especially if they can close quickly, especially in this market. I guess great
We’re going to get a nice return on this property. But let’s get a little more oomph out of it. Let’s let’s go back to them and say, hey, if they cover all closing expenses, we would take the deal. And so the broker went back and they offered to cover up to three grand worth of closing expenses, which should have covered everything, including the title policy, other related closing costs. I mean, we had our
6 % of commission to cover but That was going to be separate from the closing cost. Well, really it would just be a credit So like you know up to three thousand so that could even cover some of the commission outside of Just raw closing costs Because I generally when you when you get that on the contract like it’s just going to be treated as a credit so you know, helpful there and
However, we did see that their offer came back at 118,000, which was a little shy of the exact acreage that our property was. So like we didn’t want to be short-changed. It was like probably an extra 1500 bucks. But I’m like, hey, we, okay, first there’s no survey. didn’t require one, but we’re going off the county recorded acreage.
you know, which is just a little over 22 acres. So like, let’s make sure we’re not being shortchanged here. wanted exactly, if they offer 5,400 an acre, like make sure we’re getting the right amount. So, um.
You know, that’s something that, you know, you just really want to be double checking here. Like, you know, don’t always be in such a rush to accept these initial offers, especially if you have some activity, like be, willing to work and like look at the details and make sure that you’re not leaving anything on the table. And I didn’t really think it was anything nefarious or anything like that. was just, know,
They might’ve just been using a different number, but we’re like, hey, we’re going off the county acreage, this is we want. And in the meantime, they said, hey, this offer expires at like 6 p.m. and this was earlier in the morning yesterday. And we knew that there was another site visit happening at 9 a.m. that day. And it’s like, okay, let’s see if there’s serious buyer. we, you know, usually it’s like, can be tricky if you’re like, hey, we have a pending offer, you know, for somebody who’s just viewing the property.
to be serious or not. And you know, some folks are like, yeah, that’s kind of a pressure tactic. Or if you’re just lying, like, and you don’t have an offer on the table, like people are going to figure that out quickly. But in this case, like, you know, it’s an honest assessment there, like we had a good offer that we liked. And if they don’t choose to make an offer on the property, like they’re going to see that the that the property is going to go pending.
later that day. you know, we had an honest bullet in the chamber there. So it’s like, okay, are you going to make something, something happen here and just ask for their highest and best. So we had the realtor go back and he asked for highest and best for both, you know, the cash off 5,400 that we had, as well as the site visit, because it was like, okay, these, these sellers are going to make a decision right away. It’s clearly a hot property.
and as we were waiting for the offer number two from the site visit, and they were very interested, they were like, yeah, we’re going to send over a high offer within a few hours. we got the highest and best offer from the, 400 acre neighbor, for 57, 50 per acre, which was what our initial counter was, which was over a two X close on the deal compared to our original purchase.
PPA and they would still cover 1500 in seller closing costs. You know, it’s still another great deal. Um, it’s like, and especially if they’d be closing a week, like, yeah, maybe this other offer comes back higher. Let’s see. Um, but it’s going to be hard pressed to pass this up. Plus they already showed proof of funds. had it all set to go. Like they got all of that done immediately. Um, and then the other offer did come back at 140,000. So a bit higher, you know, roughly 12 and a half grand higher.
However, it was contingent on them selling a house of theirs which they hadn’t even listed yet and they gave themselves a 30-day close period to you know, sell the house and move on which you know super tight to do I mean Sometimes the housing market. Yeah, I could move that fast but our brokers like he thought the housing market was super slow in the area and Would be surprised if they sell it within like three to six months So we’re like, you know
Even for a little extra funds there. Do we really want to take a you highly contingent offer? That would expire within 30 days But like we have an excellent 2x plus burden hand like cash cash offer I mean those are virtually always we’re gonna take that So, you know, it wasn’t even that much of a decision, but like we did play it out We weighed all the logic, know, don’t you know called back the broker Rick really confirmed
the route that we could take for either of those and then ultimately, okay, yeah, we’re signing for the 57.50 per acre price. Already have it in the title company that closed the deal for us just last week. So it should be super quick and fast. And everything is indicating, yeah, these guys are gonna close maybe potentially by next week, probably no longer than two weeks. So.
Again, this is just an example of how we went through our dispo negotiation strategy. You know, especially if you can kind of create a bit of a bidding war, like bump the price as much as possible. Don’t just immediately accept what’s on your door. And, you know, the key takeaway here is that 2X margin deals are still available. Are they always going to sell like immediately within a day? Like crazy internal rate of return, but
Um, no, this is a rarity, but it’s a nice win when they do happen, you know, knock on wood, actually closes, but I have very little concern that it’s not going to. So hopefully this is helpful and just showing you again, what’s possible within this business. Um, when, uh, uh, you really stay focused, um, on finding good deals and, uh, there is margin to be found. SeriousLand.Capital for any of your funding needs again, 50K minimum.
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