In this episode, the disposition of a $475K Louisiana minor subdivision (three 10-11 acre parcels) finally closes after nearly a year on market, with all three lots under contract following a collapsed second-half 2025 real estate market. The deal moved from a base case underwriting of $29K PPA down to fire-sale pricing, ultimately delivering a projected 1.17x net multiple to investors after aggressive price cuts and back-to-back bidding wars.
Key Takeaways:
- Bake Margin From The Buy Buying all-in at $15K PPA created room to drop list prices nearly 50% and still hit a break-even blended exit at $17K PPA.
- Always Counter, Even In Fire-Sale Mode A $120K lowball offer was countered to $170K and accepted, proving counters work even when desperate, but only inside your walk-away threshold.
- Use Strategic Odd-Number Counters Countering at $209,750 (not a round number) implied phantom competing offers and pulled the father-son buyers from $180K to $200K on the final lot.
- $25K Is The Minimum Price Cut Above $150K Reductions smaller than $25K at premium list prices fail to trigger most buyer price-alert thresholds, making them wasted moves.
- Hold Pricing Until Money Clears The Bank Pricing on lots two and three was held flat until the contingent first sale fully closed, protecting against forced break-even cuts if the contingency collapsed.
Listen to the full episode for the exact counter-offer mechanics, the contingent house sale red flags that nearly killed the deal, and the buyer psychology behind orchestrating back-to-back bidding wars on stalled inventory.
(Podcast transcript below)
Welcome to Get Serious where at Serious Land Capital, we have funded over six and a quarter million dollars worth of land deals and have industry leading 41 % operating margins. due to some video recording errors, this is like third time that I’ve started this. So each, each of these should be, smoother with, you know, further iteration. But what I wanted to dive into today is, kind like the
key topic within the industry is disposition. So moving properties has arguably never been tougher. Perhaps in the last century of real estate deals, when you consider the entire US national picture, no surprise here, everybody’s talking about it. Everybody has their own set of difficulties, some more so than others, we’re no strangers to this.
And so what I really want to do is center in on this one larger property that we had purchased in Louisiana. So it’s a property I’ve talked about a number of times on this podcast, written about in the newsletter and so forth. But just to ensure we’re all on the same page here, I’m going to do a quick recap. this was in the most premium area of Louisiana.
highest average home prices, et cetera, beautiful area of the state. And we had purchased a little bit over 30 acres and did a three child parcel split. So all between like 10 to 11 acres roughly between them. And we did significant value add to all three of those child parcels, installed gravel driveways, cleared out home sites. And it made it as turnkey as possible for new
residential home buyer. They had public water at the street, electricity, so all they would need is septic and then to actually build a home there. So our all in price for this property plus all the value add came out to be just a little shy of half a million dollars, maybe around like $4.74, $4.75ish, like actual capital out for
uh, the, land and the value add there, you know, excluding some marketing costs and so forth, uh, that we utilize for Dispo. And, um, we did take investor capital, um, for this. was early 2025 for, uh, for this particular deal. And when we underwrote this, um, you know, conservatively, we were expecting to make close to a double, um, on the, uh, the property. So, you know, our all in price was.
approximately 15K per acre. we anticipated, you know, again, relatively base case. Well, not relatively, but actual base case in our investor materials was a $29,000 per acre pricing. the comps thoroughly justified that we thought, you we were planning to higher. We were very superior land listing and
The underlying market justified that. So that’s to give you the lay of the land, ton of disposition issues followed, took forever to move these things. This was the hardest set of properties, one particular project that we’ve ever worked on to have to dispo. And the punchline is we have all three under contract. So I can give you kind of the full updated download.
on this, but you know, it took nearly a year to get this done. And you can hear me talk about this a lot more. And I written about it, you know, the whole local real estate market, I just like largely collapse shortly after we purchased this. Like there was no dispositions effectively the whole second half of 2025. And the initial underwriting we had there just was starting to fall apart. And so we started more aggressively.
repricing the asset, especially toward the end of 2025. And the last time I had updated our audience on this deal is that we had our most premium asset out of the three. And I should mention that, okay, three relatively equally sized child parcels. But what we did is we varied up where the home site was going to be for each of the three.
And so it gave a bit more individual flair for each of the properties, which is never a bad thing to consider when you’re doing a minor subdivision project. So you can fit slightly different buyer profiles and make certain listings a bit more premium than others and change up your price points as well. And so that was our goal there. And so the most premium asset
that we had. And again, I’m going to give the reference numbers here, like for what we were trying to price is that. we initially listed this at 450 K for one of them. Um, but the most premium asset, was this beautiful flag lot, which is, um, you know, a hundred foot plus, uh, uh, gravel driveway. mean, just spectacular view. Um, especially when you saw it from kind of the street facing, facing into the property. Um,
And we didn’t think, yeah, was it going to fully sell at 450? Maybe not, but we thought at least like high 30s, maybe low lower 40k PPA based on the comps we were seeing. It was realistic. I know in hindsight, it’s like, are you guys thinking? But you guys know how we under ideal. like, we wouldn’t have pursued this, we wouldn’t have collected investor capital that people wouldn’t agree to fund or invest with us unless the underlying data justified.
that underwriting. So that’s where we landed on. And eventually through a bunch of price cuts, we got down to 275,000, which would still have been profitable for us because we had a lot of room on this deal. We bought it all in at 15k per acre. So net of closing costs and realtor commission, like worst case, we probably just had to exit at a blended.
Um, 17 K breaker roughly, um, to at least get all, all money back net of a net of closing costs. Um, so we had a ton of room there, uh, again, starting out at 45 K breaker, you know, needing to exit at 17. Um, and in absolute worst case there. So we had it listed for 275 K and this was start of February of this year.
And this is one that I did update you all. Hey, we got this one under contract. A little bit more of a unique situation. It was contingent on a house sale. Usually I’m pretty cautious about those. It’s not the first time we’ve been approached about that. But in this case, like we thoroughly ran DD on ensuring that, hey, like it’s a hotter market for the house that the, you know, the buyer for our lot was, was trying to sell.
a lot of recent comps there, like we thoroughly reviewed that and, felt confident that it was like, it was priced to be able to, to move in a reasonable timeframe. and so we, we agreed to, to that offer there. And we also got like a little bit of a kicker bonus on it that, you know, we got like a half, half a percent taken off the commission.
from the buy side agent. So, you know, that that saved us maybe like a couple grand off of anticipated closing costs. And really the only additional piece of that deal is that, you know, the driveway that was installed on that particular child parcel, it’s like by 50 feet, maybe like a very small sliver.
crossed over into one of the other child parcels. so normally we would just handle it, hey, there’s a legal easement to cross over. Like we had already formed up the maps. They’d gotten approved by the parish prior. But the buyer’s kind of like, hey, we would rather just like have the maps redrawn and for this fully to be on our property, getting rid of that, you legal easement piece. So that was a stipulation. We were in no position to fight them on that.
and it wasn’t like that big of a deal. We knew it was gonna be approved again, basically a little bit of red tape and costing a couple grand. But the way we had structured that was like, we would only have to pay that out of our proceeds at the close. And if the surveyor needed to be paid earlier than the close, which was going to be the latest at the end of June of this year, that our realtor who was just, you know.
behind us every step of the way was so agreeable to work with, would agree to pay from their brokerage and then just get reimbursed from us once the property actually closed. So we structured all of that just to keep cash flow and expenses a little bit.
you know, what less harsh to, uh, to our bottom line bank account, which is like running at like maybe $1,500 left in the bank account. Uh, since we didn’t raise a lot of capital reserves. Um, again, you know, if you raise extra capital reserves, you’re to have to pay extra preference on that. So it’s always a kind of a balance. There’s how much you might need versus reducing the total cost of the project. So
As we were pursuing, getting this property to close, we were basically in fire sale territory, close to a year long hold on this, again, really questionable market, still kind of deteriorating conditions, macro wasn’t the best, started the Iran war, et cetera. It’s like, how many people are really gonna be?
Um, potentially purchasing these and they’ve already been sitting for a long time, you know, lot of black marks on the property. We’ve, cut price several times already. Like it’s just, it does not look great. Like let’s get our money out and just keep, keep moving. That’s generally going to be our strategy. If things have just been sitting, um, for, uh, for too long and you know, that this is the, just how things go sometimes. Um, but you have to be willing to, uh, to pivot on a dime as necessary. And so once we got one under contract, it’s like, okay,
we now we have some additional room baked in because if our goal is like, let’s just get our money back here. and that first property that was listed at 275. we got the, think the, I have to look at the contracts that this came in a while ago, but I want to say the,
buyers came in at around two 20 and we countered them at like two 40, two 45, I want to say. And they ended up coming up to two 36. I know two 36 is like the final contract number, but I forget what those initial counter, and, and proposed purchase prices were, but like always goes show, like just, you even if you’re, you’re kind of in fire sale mode, like if somebody comes back with something low ball, whatever, like just try to counter a little bit.
You want to try to eke out a bit more if you can, but with the strict instructions to your realtor, like, hey, no hardball here. if they, like 220, that’s past our threshold. Because again, all we needed was like a blended 170,000 across all three properties. And that would have been that. So like each gross exit needed to be, I don’t know, 185-ish.
accounting for closing costs to still hit our net 17 PPA. So, like 220 gross would have been over our threshold, but we’re like, Hey, let’s try to bump them up a bit more. Got them to 236. So that gave us a lot more room for our other two parcels. And so then I felt more comfortable because like these are really strong buyers. They had visited the property multiple times, low flight risk. know, they were heavily incentivized to sell their house. They were like a remarried couple.
had two houses from previous marriages, so needed to sell one. Heavily motivated to move on that. So all of that was lining up. It’s like, okay, we got this one for 236. Heading in the right direction, let’s try lowering price again on the other two. And so one of them that, again, I’m going to give you all the numbers. One of the other parcels, kind of the…
second best out of the three, we had initially listed at 400K right off the bat. And it was down to 250K when that first parcel was at 275. So like, okay, let’s cut off another 25K here. Let’s put it right below the 225K threshold. And generally when you’re at pricing of above like 100K ish,
maybe 150 K or so a lot of the buyer thresholds for like pricing alerts are going to be at 25 K chunks. So like, yeah, you could like, if you have a $500,000, $300,000 property, you could cut five, 10 K here or there, but it’s not, you know, generally not going to trigger most of the default price threshold. So like 25 K at those higher levels.
Um, it’s kind of your minimum, uh, Reduction to, uh, to consider, um, in order to hit like potential potential new buyers. So, uh, that, that, that’s just something to, uh, to keep in mind. Um, so we reduced that to, uh, two 25 and then our other, um, parcel, the, uh, you know, least valuable or the, you least amount of work done to it. We had listed at two 25.
Yeah. So the weakest one, it also came to market earlier. So it was more of a test case. So we’d listed it at 400, but we had a quick trigger like three weeks after we’d listed it when the other two parcels weren’t ready. And so we cut by another 50,000. And so really when all three parcels were on the market, one was at 350, one was at 400, one was at 450. And we were kind of price testing initially there.
And so again, we were at 350, we were all the way down to 225 and these are like nearly 50 % price cuts. Um, but we still had margin to like at least breakeven, um, net or still have some potential profit in the deal, which again is like always why you bake in downside protection from, from the buy, uh, even in like really rough situations like this for, for Dispo where the market completely fell apart. Um, so we were at 225 and then we reduced to just under 200 K.
So that’s where we were at when we already had that one parcel under contract. And fortunately that house that needed to be sold that was contingent for our first property went under contract within a few weeks. But it was a really weird situation.
I still don’t have the full story behind it, but even though we had direct communication with the agent who was managing house sale for the buyer, which was not the same agent who was managing the buyers for our property. So three agents involved, our agent, had the buy side agent for the land and then also a seller.
seller agent, a listing agent for the buyer’s house. So that agent for some reason took their house off market, even though it was pending. And there was some underlying approvals that had to go into place. Like first there was a house inspection and then an appraisal had to be happened. And we kept hearing updates. yeah, it’s all moving favorably. And the agent kept saying, hey, this is just…
advantageous for us to have the property off market. Like you’re going to see the brilliance of our strategy later. but I’ve never seen that before. Our realtor had never seen that before. And like, we were kind of stuck just taking the word that, this stuff is happening here. without us being able to see, Hey, this house is pending. so it, like, it didn’t really make any sense there. I can’t overstate that enough.
And so even though everything seemed to be moving forward, it’s like, what’s the edge case here is, um, you know, there are chance that, uh, you know, this, uh, you know, how sale is kind of like not happening or there’s something unusual. I mean, there certainly was something unusual going, but like, what, was there something like fraudulent going on in, in the, in the background? Um, like, I don’t know what the rationale would have been, but if we, you know,
potentially cut price even further because then we started not getting that many hits. Like there were a couple more site visits, people seemed really strong and then it got a little bit quiet again. It’s like, ah, do I need a price cut again? And now like my threshold to exit would have been like one of the properties going for 135 gross, one for 150 would have like fully broken us even. So we had some room, but like not a lot, especially.
if people tried to low ball us or see the amount of price cuts and try to get a better deal. And I wasn’t fully confident that the contingent house sale was gonna go through until we could see like additional proof online. Finally, it did go through and we never got the full story on why they pulled that off market issue there. But ultimately their house did sell.
And so then we were able to go pending with the first lot and that gave us a lot more confidence. Nevertheless, I was still like, hey, until the money is in the bank, they seem like really strong buyers here. And we were anticipating closing by, you know, the third week in May, roughly. like, I don’t want to cut price, even if it’s a bit slower on these other two lots, until we have the money in the bank, like really secure this because
If this thing has to go back on market, I’m not confident we can get that price again. And now we might have just, cut too far to where we’re not going to be able to break even. And again, my number one rule is like, don’t lose money. whatever, whatever it takes, like I was just trying to juggle multiple balls in the air, to ensure that, we were going to avoid that scenario as much as possible, even if like additional faster price cuts could have helped us move these other two lots, quicker.
Very fortunately though, like after it was, I don’t know, two, two and a half weeks of being more quiet, we had a number of new site visits that started coming around on our other two properties. And it basically ended up being a bidding war for both of them, which is just crazy because it took us a year to sell this deal and like almost no bites or so many site visits and like no offers at all. And then all of a sudden we were getting multiple offers.
and really strong buyer leads, like back to back to back. It was just crazy how much it changed on us. And so, you know, what happened was the weakest lot in terms of value. got this, you know, there’s deeper stories behind this, but I’m already at, you know, 20 minutes recording here. So I want to, I want to try to keep it tight and give you guys the most critical takeaways. So there was this father son.
duo who really liked this lot of land. The son was like much colder on it, but the dad who had the power of the purse, he was going to pay for it, was really driving for it. was like, yeah, I want to buy this thing. But they needed like a couple of weeks to put an offer together, just line up finances, et cetera. And then another visit came in and they’re like, yeah, we love this lot. Let’s go ahead and put an offer in.
And it was a, a low ball offer. at that time, again, we were listed at 200 K. They came in with an offer at 120,000 and they needed third party financing. It’s like, I don’t know if these guys really going to be able to come up higher. Like this is even below our threshold. Like we need at least 135 K to hit our break even Mark. So like we’re going to need to bump it up considerably higher, but we had it on good authority as well too, that.
the father son duo was that they had verbally said they were gonna come in at 170K, but they didn’t have a signed contract in. sometimes like these contracts are gonna have expiration dates and our broker could only represent one buyer at a time. So he needed to use his broker team member in order to…
set up the other contract, but, the first contract for 120 K was going to time out before we received the other one. And so I’m like, okay, let’s counter these guys at 170 K, like bring them up 50 K here. and, yeah, we’re, we’re at least we would know that would bring up our floor to like what the minimum offer we were anticipating getting from the father son duo.
plus this 120 K offered, they, offered to, you know, pay the two and a half, 3%, whatever, commission for the buy side broker. so that was going to save us a considerable amount of money on the backend. like, you know, their, their, gross offer net wise was actually going to be a bit better, even if it, you know, it was at a lower gross price, if that makes sense. and the father son duo.
Like they pretty much submitted their offer, like an hour or two after we had already sent the counter to, the low ball offer. but the way it plays like, Hey, we can’t, counter sign any other offer until we know what our initial counter is. Like, you can only have one, one counter out at any given time, legally. and we were going to plan to.
counter the father son offer, which did come in and writing at 170 K but no, you know, commission kicker. And it was going to be all cash. We were going to counter them at like 185. See if we could bump them up a little bit. And stunningly, the low ball offer came back the following morning and they agreed to our 170. I thought that there’s no like, this is such a huge spread. But they they agreed to it. And
Right after that, I was almost kicking myself a little bit to where it’s like, I could have countered them a bit higher. Like I should have probably countered them at, you know, 180, 185, what we’re going to counter the father son duo at. Um, because then it would have been in, in the same place, uh, uh, to potentially potentially bring them up on. Um, but again, this is all like game theory, right? Cause again, we were in no real position to negotiate. Yeah. Like we were like fire sailing these things.
And so the risk is that who knows like 170 might’ve been like the threshold for that low ball offer. And if we had pushed higher, you you never know, they might’ve walked to like, Hey, this is just like too rich for us and we’re going to be out of here. And then, you know, we didn’t have a full guarantee. We didn’t have a written offer yet from the father son duo. just had a verbal. We didn’t know what their offer was going to look like exactly.
And potentially if we counted them, they might’ve just held firm and stayed at potentially 170. And they didn’t have the kicker that saved us several thousand dollars in commission. So us getting 170K from the father-son deal would have been a worse deal than getting the low ball offer up to like 170K. Or even if the father-son, we got them up to like 175, 180, like net.
wise, it might still have been worse than, um, that, then the low ball offer coming up. So it’s like, have to balance all of this stuff carefully and just be like understanding. Uh, and again, who’s like the, wins in negotiation is always going to be the person who’s most willing to walk away. And for us, like we were pretty much going to be at the table no matter what, again, like as long as we were past our threshold and like, yeah, just sign whatever, like, you know,
bent over backwards for these guys to get this deal done. This is a fireside. We need to get out of this property. Yeah, sure. Try to get us a little bit more on this, but don’t try to push too hard. And so we got another of those properties under contract. This one was anticipated to sell in mid-June. So quick turnaround on that. And I already had pre-approval for these guys. And then
But know, since we, the counter was accepted, I was like, was telling our realtor and in the meantime here, like our also our goal was at the same time, like, yeah, do we need to these price cuts just yet? Now we have this activity, we’ve got another one of these under contract and that’s just helping, right? Like people start to see, out of the three parcels, none of them had moved forever to go pending, like back to back from each other. And it’s like, there’s only one left. That definitely increases the scarcity and urgency for, for people to move on that last one.
And we also had some pictures that were taken in January and so forth, like the greenery wasn’t as good. So we’re going to try to revamp our drone photos. Again, that can be helpful for marketing, just noting that as far as other strategies besides pricing. And so I was telling our broker, we know this father son deal, they really like the area. Can we see if they can just submit another offer for the last lot there? I mean, they’re quite similar.
This one’s price a little bit higher, but just like, let them know, like we’re, pretty much in business for the price that they had. Um, because now that we got this other property under contract for one 70, it basically made our break even threshold to have to get a property under contract for like 115 grand. And our, our, uh, second best parcel was still listed at two 25. So we had a huge spread to work with. Let’s just get this thing done. If they want to just come back in 170, fine. We’ll, we’ll take it. And,
move on, from it. so we, we had, or the, broker was able to talk with father son duo and they agree, Hey, let’s, let’s go do a site visit here more thoroughly assessed. They, were still interested that, know, I don’t think they were too upset that they lost out, but they’re like, you know, it is what it is. I got stuck in a bidding war and so, you know, they, they were just a little slow on, on the draw. So,
You know, they were more keen to, to get another offer in. And at the same time, like that exact same day, we had another site visit for that last lot too. And they were super interested. They’re like, yeah, we’re, gonna call a couple of lenders. This was on a Friday. we’re going to submit an offer, for, for this property. and so it’s like, yeah, this is just amazing. We’re going to get, we’re going to get another bidding more going, for, for this last one. and.
Uh, so we, you know, again, this was on, on, uh, heading into a weekend here and the father son dual, like they went, they got back to us way faster. Like, they already lost out on once they submitted an offer pretty much right away, um, for 180 grand. Um, and apparently they had some back, like they were going to just submit 170 K cause this one, they were gonna have to do some more clearing work. They were going to get this one financed instead of cash. Uh, so like, yeah, we’re just like,
justifying a higher price here is just gonna be tough. And the realtor who’s representing these guys, who’s like our primary realtors partner really had to work with them. Like, yeah, can you guys bump it any bit higher? And it was almost like pulling teeth for them to get from like 170 to 180K. It’s like, yeah, this is probably gonna be their max amount.
And then we heard from our broker that the other site visit who had looked at the deal like they didn’t want to get into a bidding war so they were out. They’re like, just we’re not like we love the property, but we’re not going to put an offer and we don’t want to get in a bidding war. so like that reduced our leverage for sure because we couldn’t play the prices on each other. But the father son dual also didn’t know that. And so I remember considering this and
You know, they, when they threw in their 180 K offer and this was going to close in mid June as well. Um, was like, yeah, yeah, the pricing was at, two 25 here. Like it’s a pretty big reduction they’re, they’re asking for. Um, let’s try to counter them higher. Uh, and again, like understanding we’re above our threshold. Don’t play hard ball at all. Um, but let’s see if we can push these guys, like get a little bit more out of them. Um, and.
throw out a number that’s like a bit more strategic to make it seem like there’s like they were aware that, there was a back to back site visit happened. They might think that another party is still involved and potentially could be. You never know how, you know, people might change their mind or another site visit can happen. And they already had lost out on one of the properties. So I was like, you know, go throw back like 209750, not like an even number there, but
You know, one that indicates, there was another offer there potentially, or at least get, you know, a bit of poker face. but at the same time, like if they don’t budge at all, and our understanding was like, yeah, 180 is probably their highest and best. like fine. We’ll, we’ll, bend it. We’ll roll over them and, what we’ll take the, 180 K offer, but just make sure they do not walk here. Let’s, let’s exit this.
And our broker was all on the same page here too. And he was like more wary. don’t know about sending a counter, but like we always think it’s always worth sending a counter for everything. Like even if you’re ready to roll over, like it’s just, it’s just part of real estate mechanics. I don’t know the last time we’ve ever like not countered something before. And so we sent out that 209, 750, but I was like, yeah, probably
sub 15 sub 20 % chance that they will go any higher on this. But let’s see if we can get a little bit more. And they came back at 200 K. So bumped them up another 20,000. Very surprisingly, our realtor was surprised by that too, but our counter worked again, like you just, you never know until you try it. But again, you have to balance the game theory. We mentioned all the nuance and the considerations. You don’t want to risk them walking.
but can you get a little bit more out of them and understand the buyer psychology as well too? Like it’s the last lot available. And so we got them under for 200. And so now all three parcels are set to close within like a couple of weeks of each other in early to mid-June, which is just remarkable. And so, you know, all I really cared about, I’m getting all the money back for all the investors and pretty much covering our preferred payments.
on it. So like the net multiple uninvested capital is probably going to be like, you know, uh, uh, 17 % or so, like a 1.17. Um, you know, which over like a course of a year and real estate, like it’s not the worst thing in the world. That’s why we have a preference, uh, you know, risk premium built in. Is it as good as we thought it thought it was going to be? No, definitely not. Um, but, uh, uh, again, we didn’t lose money on it, but the money’s not in the bank here, but like these are
all really strong buyers. Every indication is that these things are going to close. and so that’s why I feel comfortable, talking about it, at the, at the moment here and providing the story. but hopefully this was really illustrative for our process and our thinking through it. And, you know, just understanding how to play the game and still be aggressive, even
when you’re balancing, hey, we’re, know, fire signaling, let’s just get out of here. So, that is a difficult tightrope to walk, but hopefully this gives you some ideas on how we handled our Dispo. And like, this is just huge, huge sigh of relief. Our last parcel that we’ve had from our 2025 portfolio, our underwriting is like, I think 10X better than it was when we initially did this. Like I didn’t have tools like Reventure and so forth that we were using when we…
first underwrote this property. And we would have done a lot of things different. Doesn’t dissuade me from minor subdivisions. you know, this could have been a lot worse. It wasn’t great either, but learned so much along the way and know that we can do a lot more very solid ones and still stay on our investors, you know, good graces by getting their money back and some profit as well in arguably the most difficult real estate market nationally in the last hundred years.
Take your victories when you can with all that in mind subscribe and share everybody. You this one was a bit longer But hope you all appreciate the deep dive. Take care. Bye. And if you do want funding seriousland.capital, you know that
