This episode examines a five-acre property near Seattle that appeared to be a premium acquisition at $70K but revealed critical access issues through multiple layers of due diligence. The property’s complex history—purchased for $250K in 2008, lost to tax auction in 2022—and aggressive seller behavior triggered deeper investigation that uncovered a decades-old county denial for driveway access across a sub-10-foot sliver of land between the property and public road access.
Key Takeaways:
- Never Assume Road Access Without Verification Even properties appearing to have direct street frontage may have hidden access barriers—this parcel had a previously denied driveway application from 20 years ago that would have left the only buildable area a half-mile from legal access.
- Small Gaps in Parcel Lines Demand Investigation Sub-10-foot slivers between property boundaries and roads aren’t mapping errors—click every gap to verify ownership and access rights before assuming you have street access.
- Legal Access Doesn’t Equal Physical Access The property technically had legal access through a northern easement, but without existing infrastructure, building utilities to the only viable southern site would cost tens of thousands in driveway and utility installation.
Listen to the full episode to hear how multiple due diligence reviews nearly missed this deal-killing access issue.
(Podcast transcript below)
Hi, Chris Duff at Serious Land Capital, Vacant Land Funding Partner. So today I wanted to share another lesson about that lemon. We barely avoided purchasing and funding in Washington state with a ton of lessons involved there. So there were a couple previous podcasts recognizing how to spot seller warning signs. Also how to
conduct even deeper due diligence regarding possible wetlands impact. Now I wanted to talk about really figuring out additional possible access issues. So, you know, just to catch you up in case you didn’t listen to those other podcasts, this was, yeah, roughly five acre narrow parcel. It looked like a lowercase L.
that was in a highly developed area just north of Seattle, looked to be a really premium spot that was previously purchased for about a quarter million dollars, then sold via tax auction for pittance a few years ago. And we had it under contract for a very attractive price with an aggressive seller. And so I mentioned, there’s wetlands issues that came up. And the next piece was…
the actual road access. you know, access is like, it’s hard to say what is the most important DD item when it comes to land, but having access to a road might be the most important out of all of them. It might have the most dramatic impact on pricing compared to virtually any other.
uh, characteristic of a certain property. And so, you know, in, in podcast forum, it’s going to be a little difficult to describe here, but, uh, basically if you can imagine there being a capital U of a major subdivision area, um, and our five acre narrow property was kind of sitting right in the middle of that U.
And it looked like at first glance, even second glance that the Southern boundary had direct access to that road, um, that the major subdivision had. it was like, okay, yeah, this is super basic. Uh, it’s going to have all the public, um, utilities and so forth available to it. This is going to be super cut and dry. And it’s like a way larger parcel, you know, it’s five acres compared to, you know, quarter.
quarter acre to a half acre lots that surround it. However, when we dove deeper into this property and I credit initially our third party due diligence consultant who does our full written reports on this was indicating, I think this thing is going to be landlocked here. And I’m certain about the road X. What are you talking about?
I didn’t even, this wasn’t even flagged for me when I first reviewed this property and we were operating under this assumption for weeks that we had a real premium property we were going to buy for like 70K. Some builder interest was already like north of 200K. We were going to set up a possible near transactional deal with equity upside. Like you can’t ask for anything better. And so when I took a deeper look at the property today and right on that sort of southern boundary,
there was a tiny sliver of a gap between where that public access road was in the the very bottom boundary of the property. And sometimes you can write those off because like a lot of county parcel maps, they might be inaccurately mapped or, you know, some of the lines just don’t fully line up with the road. And so,
I didn’t really question it, but when you actually clicked on that small sliver, and we’re talking like sub 10 feet of space between the road and where the southern boundary that property like, mean, we’re really talking to sliver here. But if you clicked on that little small area between it, like it showed, Hey, there’s actually another whole parcel. it was, was, you know, land ID showing at parcel pending. We don’t know who the owner was. So it’s like, okay.
We don’t know the situation with this land. Maybe it’s public access. It wouldn’t be an issue to cross over that little sliver on the south side. But then looking at it more and realizing, okay, yeah, the surrounding neighborhood, none of them have those issues with their parcel lines touching the street or having any little gaps there. So it doesn’t seem to be like county parcel line related issues. There might actually be something here.
And so we actually dug further into the county records. And again, credit the land investor working with us to find all of this info, but there was documented attempts around 20 years ago where the previous owner had tried to apply for access for a driveway to cross that little sliver of land and the county denied it.
He said, Oh, it’s something for County related trail or utilities meant or something. Um, you know, they actually provided their rationale. was reading over the docs. It’s very surprising. They didn’t want to approve anything like this, but that is not a good precedent to set. it’s like, man, if we bought this here, we thought we’re going to have like golden Southern boundary access right into a premium neighborhood. And it was already denied in the past. Do we really want to take the risk of trying to.
gamble for that again. And so that was a huge catch right there that I just, you know, I flat out missed. Just was making blanket assumptions, wasn’t looking closely enough. So that’s a lesson right there. Anytime there’s little gaps, like really, really, really be certain, make the right calls into the various authorities to figure out what’s going on in a situation like that before you get caught with, you know, possibly a landlocked property.
And it turns out there was still legal access. However, it was from the northern boundary of the property needing an extensive easement to a road, public road much farther to the north. So technically there was legal access, but there was no easement already, you know, or no driveway or anything in place to actually access the property. So that obviously was super annoying. It was going to make, you know, utilities that much more expensive.
to line up, especially power and so forth. And I know I talked about the wetlands issue in the previous podcast. So that basically relegated the only buildable area to the very Southern tip of the property. So that just added, you’re kind of kicking the property while it was down.
losing the analogy here. But into the frying pan or out of the frying pan and into the fire. You’re getting my drift here. was like, okay, we’re adding insult injury. That is the phrase that I was looking for. Forgive me as my brain was continuing to operate. But essentially that was going to the building site the only viable building site for the property.
Um, about a half mile away from road access. I mean, that’s a super expensive driveway, utility installation. That’s going to add, you know, tens of thousands of dollars of extra cost to build out this property. It’s like, Oh man, this is so much hair to deal with here. And you know, our broker who was already reaching out to builders, like you didn’t realize this at the time. We didn’t realize this at the time until, uh, you know, very recently.
reviewing the property. But at least there was legal access. So we were trying to figure out what else can we do to still sort out whether we could sell this property and that’s going to be a story for another podcast. But in this case, it was a lesson of like, don’t ever.
you know, out of any property characteristic, don’t ever make too many assumptions about legal and physical access to a property because if you are off on that, it will destroy your economics and you’re going to be in for a world of hurt. So this one was very tricky to figure out. needed a super close eye to determine that, Hey, there’s actually some questions here. I missed it the first time I at the property, the second time, the third time, the fourth time.
And it didn’t become clear to me until today, but again better late than never I’m still have beginner mentality And a humility to how I approach Reviewing land deals. You can never be too careful. You can never learn too many lessons. So, you know, I learned a lot of lessons today And you know, it’s only gonna make you better going forward. So hopefully this helps you with your own review of properties
SeriousLand.Capital for any of your funding needs. Zero cost review of your land deals at Land Daily Diligence Facebook group and landpricer.ai. For most simple and accurate way to price land, subscribe and share. Talk to you next time. Take care. Bye.
