However, one situation where you may want to consider a realtor is if you want top dollar and you’re willing to wait. You don’t necessarily need a chunk of money in the next 30 days. You’re willing to wait 3, 6, maybe even 12 months to sell your land. A realtor is probably a good fit for you in that scenario, specifically an agent that’s local to the area where your land is located. Some of the pitfalls of course of realtors are (and I should say, this is not like I want to dis realtors, I work with realtors as well and some of them are truly fantastic) but there still are the downsides to using a realtor to sell land. I’d say the first and the biggest one is the fact that land is different than houses. The land market is more inefficient, so it’s harder sometimes to find comparable sales to really be able to value the land.
Realtors also tend to overprice the land, which means that it’s going to sit out there forever and ever and ever, and not sell. I’ve purchased land from folks who had listed land with a realtor and it had sat there for over a year, even in this hot market.
The other thing about realtors is of course, they don’t work for free, nor should they. They work for a 10% commission typically for all land sales- so 5% of the commissions go into the seller’s agent, 5% go in to the buyer’s agent. There’s also sometimes brokerage fees and transaction fees and closing costs and things like that. So there’s more paperwork and hassle that you have to go through there. But ultimately, again, if you’re looking to try and get top dollar, a realtor’s going to be the one to do that for you.
One thing I would tell you above all – and this may rub some of you the wrong way – is don’t try and sell land yourself.
And I know some folks think that, well, “My cousin Joe down the street there, he sold his house for sale by owner, he did just fine.” Well, the truth is, I think it’s less than 8% of all transactions on the market are FSBOs, for sale by owner. There’s a reason for that. And again, just because somebody sold their house for sale by owner does not mean you’re going to be able to sell your land for sale by owner. Again, land is different than houses. It’s much harder to sell. And chances are, if you’re trying to sell land on your own, you don’t have a marketing machine built up, you don’t have Facebook ads, you don’t know about the flat fee services to list your land, and you don’t really want to deal with all that stuff.
So again, if you’re looking to sell your land quickly with an all cash offer and you’re looking to close within 30 days, I’m your buyer. Reach out to me at ocalaroad.com, provide me with just lead information about your land and we’ll get you an all cash offer. If you’re looking to get top dollar and you’re not necessarily caring about selling the land anytime soon, reach out to a local realtor in the area. I know they’ll be happy to list the property for you. So, I hope some of this information was helpful. If you’ve got any questions about selling your land, feel free to reach out to me at ocalaroad.com, and thanks for watching and have a great day. And either way, regardless of which path you choose, I wish you the best of luck. Thanks.