This episode documents Chris’s brutal 84-hour sprint reviewing 2,000 comps for LandPricer data collection. Key insights: price-per-acre works consistently in Tennessee, North Carolina, and parts of Oklahoma; Washington state near metros shows extreme variability; Nevada outside Vegas/Reno has virtually zero sales activity; and 20-30% of US landmass sees almost no trading volume.
Key Takeaways:
- Geographic Reliability Varies Wildly Tennessee, North Carolina, and Oklahoma offer consistent price-per-acre signals; Washington near Seattle and most Northeast/Midwest markets show high variance and sparse data that breaks standard comping methods.
- 97% Vacant Doesn’t Mean 97% Tradable Roughly 20-30% of US landmass has zero meaningful sales activity—entire regions like interior Nevada are comp deserts where pricing becomes guesswork, limiting scalable land business geography.
- Volume Built Unshakable Confidence Reviewing 2,000 properties in 84 hours (averaging one comp every 2.5 minutes) created industry-leading underwriting confidence now applied to $500K-$10M deals with full conviction.
Listen for specific state-by-state reliability rankings and why Serious Land Capital’s underwriting edge comes from raw repetition that most operators never accumulate.
(Podcast transcript below)
Welcome to Get Serious. So I reviewed 2000 parcels of land within about 84 hours. This was definitely pushing the burnout gears here. And so just want to share some of the lessons learned from that. The whole purpose behind this was to build up more of a
data repository for Lampricer. More updates to come from that. Really as the complexity has continued to arise here, like we’re looking to bring on additional help and partners to help take this thing to the next level, especially trying to run two businesses at once. Resource constrained as it is, like it’s just, it’s turned into a larger.
vision. I will share more on that for any of you that might have been wondering what’s going on in the background. But in any case, too, we’ve realized that the pricing dilemma is just so much more reliant on massive amounts of data to inform correct pricing.
across all the geographies that we were looking at, where our initial algorithms just weren’t as consistently performing. So again, just trickier thing to solve here. Pricing manually, it’s hard enough alone. A lot of folks struggle with it. And occasionally we do as well and we consider ourselves like best in the industry.
Or you know plenty of other folks will consider that you know don’t take my work for it And so you know trying to turn that into an engineering You know solvable problem, especially doing it across a whole bunch of different geographies like it’s just it’s difficult to solve so you know the whole goal of this was to Okay start directionally heading towards solidifying
a lower pricing variance for our calculations. So we were like, okay, let’s get a data set of a hundred properties and start using that to inform our model better. And like the way that we had set up land price or was that, you know, each property that we’re reviewing will by default, select up to 20.
comps auto selected for review. You can always add more additionally. So like a hundred times, you know, most of these properties, some had a little bit less. Um, but you know, most of the properties that came up like had 28 comps within a 10 mile radius. like a hundred times 20, turns into 2000. So, um, you know, doing it within that span of time, it was really myself digging myself into a hole. Like I thought this was going to be
a simpler project than it just, it was not. And I was just under the gun to get other things done. So like, man, I’m just gonna have to grind through this weekend to do it. Who cares? Like no one listening cares the hole that I dug myself into. I’m sure you as an entrepreneur can relate though of, you know, facing tougher, tougher deadlines. You’re like, yeah, this just has to get done. You just have to eat it.
But I just want to talk to you about more of the lessons learned from doing this. so we were using properties that had been part of our, that we had either funded, obviously we hadn’t done a hundred properties very recently. So we were just also going across the country and just picking appropriate sold comps within the last couple of months and then utilizing those as target properties. And so we also had like,
the actual firm data, we know what this property sold for. And I was also trying to choose properties that were representative of the rest of the market. Like not too crazy of outliers or like, you know, landlocked stuff that there wasn’t really anything else similar to it or it wasn’t like an immediate fire sale. So like some of these properties, you know, that go pending within like a day or two.
Not all the time. Sometimes they can just be really superior properties, but plenty of time, like they could have just been under price from the start. And so their price to sell and not really representative of their true market value. So you had to be careful even selecting these properties to start here. And I was trying to get like a grab bag across the country throughout this, like five, six properties in a certain state and just keep moving on and just going across most of typical land flipping States here.
and even though like I was burning myself out hard, like I just learned so many key lessons. Just, I just feel absolutely on fire in terms of, ability to comp properties. Like, I mean, it’s just, yeah, I don’t know if anybody has reviewed that many properties in that short period of time. and like we were already good, but now it’s just like, I just feel so confident about any property people are sending over to us. And we’ve had a lot of deal flow come in.
big, like almost near a million dollar purchases. And I’m just, I’ve just been disagreeing with some of the, the, the underwriting that people have been sending over, but like, I’m feeling very, very confident with our determination. Like the data is just backing it up. We’re like not pulling stuff out of thin air. mean, I know some folks say, yeah, you can like comp in a minute, a couple of minutes here, some areas maybe, but you know, most people I don’t think are putting enough time and patience into properly comp. Like it’s.
most of these properties that you’re looking at can be appropriately priced. There are a handful that are, you’re really gonna need a broker’s assistance, especially commercial stuff where you just really can’t find any relevant comps in the area. I would say that it’s a small minority at the time for most listed property, resi, recreational.
agricultural properties that don’t have like a ton of unique features, like you should be able to get a reasonable determination for most properties if you are patient enough and let the data speak to you without rushing through or biasing yourself throughout the process.
You know, all of that to say it’s like, I was just diving in and like, was trying to be efficient, right? I was trying to do 2000 properties in such a short period of time. Um, so you learn how to be efficient, but you know, throughout all of this, you know, it was really picking out where some areas definitely were just much easier to do than others. Like some areas, the country price per acre was just such a reliable.
mechanism like it’s just a consistent 6k per acre, you know, even like minor characteristics, determinations. I would say there was a lot of areas of like Tennessee, North Carolina, Colorado, parts of California, and Oklahoma, for instance. I was trying to choose disclosure states just to be a bit easier in terms of the data collection here.
But, you in most areas of that state where I was targeting, not all. I’ll get into that in a little bit, but, you know, you could more reliably use price per acre and like the features were more consistent. Even like contour was relatively consistent, whether it was like a super hilly area versus a more flat area. Like you could find some really consistent setups in terms of pricing.
and you know, some areas were just way more difficult, probably camera, like some of the variation, that I was finding, like Washington state sticks out for instance. so in the Eastern part of the state, like near Spokane, it was easier maybe because again, the train is more consistent across a lot of the areas.
but closer to Seattle, there was just such significant variation. I think, you know, it, it was harder to say.
you know, area by area, but like on average, like the closer you would get to a major Metro, the, would be far more variability in pricing, especially for larger lots. Like again, I’m, and we were trying to use price per acre a lot more. So was trying to stick above like five acre plus parcels. because like I’ve talked about a number of times price per acre really breaks down. Sub two acres roughly. And in which case you just need to use raw price.
so, you know, you can find consistency there. Yeah. You get to the more urban metro areas, looking more at infill lots. but then you’re just going to have to be going on pricing versus PPA. So like, it was also dependent on the types of, and the sizing of properties that I was looking at, but like, there was just so much more significant variation. and. know, different types of, you know, small improvements on the property, or I think closer to the Metro is like.
there was just a higher chance that there was more improvements either being done from a utility side or like a resi.
preparation, like cleared lots or soil grading.
you know, driveway installations, et cetera. so that just had to be accounted for. it like, I was just finding, yeah, this is really difficult to find. you know, some real consistency when it comes to comping properties here, you just, it got a lot, a lot trickier on average to do that. And some of those, like, if I had like sub three comps that I thought were truly appropriate, it’s like, yeah, I really can’t consider.
utilizing this as part of our data set and then you have to like move on to try to do another one. so that that’s just kind of something to, to keep in mind here. as you, you know, consider any area of the country that, that you’re working within and some of these areas too, even in the more rural areas, like perc tests were like almost a given for all comps. Like you pretty much needed that and it was a requirement to even be something sold in the area.
or have like confirmation that water access could be provided or like a community well, like that was also relevant to like Washington state. so I started to learn a lot more of the geographic specific things. especially in relation to utilities, like, yeah, if it didn’t have this, like you pretty much not even, you’re going to be at SOL when it comes to even potentially selling the property. that was true for lot of parks of Oregon as well.
Um, so you start to learn, okay, yeah. So some of these areas, like the utility consideration is just a requisite to even be considered, um, to, sell a property. Um, another piece related. Well, I think another piece too, is when I was like, I was just going all across the country reviewing this is, you know, we know that in the U S it’s like something like 97 % of all land is vacant. Um,
or not, not, not, not improved across the country. Um, and, know, while intuitively we understand that, yes, closer to the major population centers, there’s going to be more at, you know, more inventory, more active sales and so forth. I don’t think we understand just how inactive.
You know, still huge percentages of the country are, cause it’s like, okay, yeah, 97 % of the vacant land, but you know, probably sporadically, you’re still going to have a decent amount of activity, even if it’s, you know, comparatively less than some areas. But I mean, there are some areas of the country, I mean, and probably percentage wise we’re talking, I wouldn’t, I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s like 20, 30 % at least of the U S land mass. Um, it’s like not actively traded at all, or you might have like sporadic.
one, two Z type of properties out there that’s like almost impossible to comp. because it’s just so far out there. in a, a big example was like in Nevada, where yeah, you’ll have some trades near Las Vegas or like just west of Las Vegas closer to the border with California. he’s like the Lake Havasu area, something like that. And then up near Reno kind of where Lake Tahoe is.
but almost the entire rest of the state, there was like no sales, no activity at all. don’t know, it’s kind of like desert, surprise. that being said, like still there’s decent amount of land where we like, know, know West Texas and so forth that will trade some of those desert square type properties. But even with that, some of those areas are just like completely blank. So I think that was just kind of like an interesting piece where, you know,
we think we have the whole country to work with. Yeah, prices can be different. Markets can be a bit different here, but like it is, you know, the landmark is more constrained than, um, than you might think. Like there’s only a certain amount of areas that are like trading actively enough, especially in the, you know, on average difficult market like this to, um, to, even consider participating in. So, uh, that was another piece, um, that, that I thought was
was pretty interesting there.
You know, besides that as well, too, like it just like I did mention, you know, getting closer to the metros, like it just got way harder to comp. And so that’s why, you know, I was trying to comp closer to some of those areas or like closer, like the northeastern states, you know, some parts of the Midwest and on average, like that was just harder. Like, mean, there’s a reason why the typical land flipping states, you kind of draw you from the lower 48.
tend to have more trick, because it’s just those markets are more consistent. Like that kind of goes in relation to the above point. And I know some people have built businesses by going into some of those trickier areas where there might not be as much activity, but it’s just, again, it’s going to be on average harder to perform up there just because you’re…
data is going to be more highly varied or more sparse in terms of even a raw data perspective. So it can be both less reliable as well as less, I’m trying to think of the word here. So you have reliable, if like you’re hitting a bullseye consistently.
forget that there’s another term when I was like in statistics and met school classes back in the day. It’s, yeah, ver verifiable versus reliable. You know, I’m going to live live review this because versus valid. So, yeah, things could be reliable in terms of, you know, I’m hitting the same mark consistently and more valid if it’s the correct mark. So
that can be true for a lot of these markets. Well, I don’t know if that kind of means the same thing for the land market. Let me live think this through here. Because in order to get reliability, you’re just going to need a lot of data. And valid is probably a lower pricing variance. So that works. So on average, like in some of those sparser markets,
Northeast Midwest and a lot of areas. Like it’s just going to be less valid and less reliable data to work with oftentimes. So like, again, why people would gravitate towards more of those, you know, typical flipping areas. Just because again, we’re at the behest of the data that we have to work with. So that was that was another pretty interesting piece to
to consider here. And then again, like some of these areas, like the amount of duplicates that were, you know, just part of the data set or, you know, just having off market listings. Again, it’s just, it’s crazy. I mean, this is part of the land game, right? But it’s just, this is why it’s so hard to do this at scale of like collecting appropriate data sets and just.
scaling land business to work like the same way everywhere because the data is just so inconsistent across so many different jurisdictions and different funding for different municipalities managing the GIS and the underlying county data, which makes this all so much trickier. Or again, even finding the correct APNs and addresses from the publicly listed properties.
is its own beast in and of itself or like if an area is like crazy subdivide heavy, it’s way harder to find what that underlying parcel might be because it might not be chopped up to have its own parcel ID as well by that point. So that’s just something to consider as well here when, our recommendation is always, don’t always take the word for what is on the property description.
like go back and find the core property on an aerial map to confirm the characteristics. So, but like when I was going all through this, that was part of it. I’m checking the photos within Redfin, I’m looking at the property description, utilities, et cetera, improvements, anything on that. I’m confirming everything back in a map. Some areas, like I had enough of an idea or if I found an area where it’s like, okay, I already reviewed this street, I know what the next one looks like next to it. But for the most part,
especially if you’re like really putting money down besides just a data set. Like you want to be confirming everything from multiple different data sources. So that was another piece as well there. So yeah, we’re almost 20 minutes in. I feel like there’s probably some other minor pieces. I’m just kind of like going grab bag for everything that I found.
Um, so again, hopefully this is informative for your own review here. And again, it’s just a reps game. Like we have gotten so good at reviewing properties and, know, I’ve talked to some other bigger land investors this year. Like it really struggled this year. Like we can never forget, you know, again, 54 % of private businesses lose money or break even on a yearly basis. Like half of people you talk to. Aren’t actually, aren’t actually like doing a good job at their business. So like, just keep that in mind.
And that might be yourself. I’ve been in that situation before too. So just like know how tricky it is to like build a sustainable business. And like we’ve had a great year, fortunately. But you know, a lot of that, you know, some, some luck was involved with, you know, things bouncing the right way for us, but you know, the vast majority of our results is just cause like we’re so, so rigorous about our underwriting and having downside protection. know, right now my partner and I were like, like we have, you
75 % of the cash in our account is just reinvested profits, like hundreds of thousands of dollars right now. And that’s not even accounting like our existing, you know, still portfolio to sell a couple larger deals here. It’s like we’re just, we’ve done really well managing our liquidity and cash accounts. And like that shows, and because again, we just, spend every single day, reviewing properties and getting better at underwriting. So hopefully some of these lessons help you out here.
Like again, I reviewed 2000 properties in 84 hours. That’s the type of volume it takes. I’m not going to do that all the time, but I can tell you it made me even better underwriter than I had been. Translating that over to my team. I feel like I can reliably review any deal in the country at this point.
put it in front of me, $500K, $10 million, I’ll find a way to review it and feel confident about it and raise money if needed. That is just like the level of expertise we’re trying to build and we’re just getting started here. take these lessons for your own business. Hope to work with you, SeriousLand.Capital, looking for any of funding, 50K purchase price and above, Land Daily Diligence Facebook group. Subscribe and share everybody. Take care now. Have a good weekend. Bye.
