Mike Browning

Tag: Land Appraisal

  • Everyone But Me

    Everyone But Me

    As it turns out, not everyone.

    I never got into gaming.

    But it felt like everybody else had a console, a headset, and a whole second life happening on a screen I wasn’t looking at. My kids, their friends, plenty of adults…even some older than me. So I made an assumption and never questioned it.

    If everybody’s playing, somebody must be making a fortune.

    Then I read something about Microsoft and the Xbox recently.

    They have spent billions building games, buying studios, and chasing market share, only to discover that popularity and profitability aren’t the same thing. From the outside it looked like an easy business. From the inside it was far more complicated.

    It’s a good reminder that what “everybody knows” is often just the part everyone can see.

    Land works the same way.

    If you own property anywhere near the DFW growth path, you’ve probably heard the stories.

    A neighbor sold for three times what he paid. Somebody got bought out for a data center. A family down the road suddenly became millionaires.

    Those stories spread fast. Before long, they become what “everyone knows.”

    Sometimes they’re even true.

    The problem is that they usually don’t tell you much about your property.

    Land values can change from one road to the next. Sometimes from one side of the fence to the other. Access, utilities, topography, floodplain, buyer demand, surrounding uses, and dozens of other factors can push one tract well above or well below the one everyone keeps talking about.

    That’s why I think there’s a difference between hearing what land is worth and knowing what your land is worth.

    Most people don’t need that answer today. You’re probably not considering selling. You may even plan to never sell.

    But when life changes, a health issue, an estate, a buyer calling unexpectedly, or a family decision, that’s a terrible time to discover you’ve been relying on local folklore instead of current market information.

    P.S.– Most landowners who request an MBR Land Reality Check aren’t planning to sell.

    They simply want to know where they stand before they ever need the answer.

    The report includes recent comparable sales, current market activity, and my opinion of what a reasonable buyer might pay today, without any obligation to sell.

    Is it a bad idea to know?

    Get It Here

    P.P.S.– If you’re not interested in a Land Reality Check but enjoy reading about land, markets, and North Texas growth, you can subscribe to my occasional emails below.

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  • Don’t Get Your Feelings Hurt

    Don’t Get Your Feelings Hurt

    I’d rather be slightly conservative than tell you fairy tales.

    When people ask for a Land Reality Check, sometimes they’re disappointed in what I tell them.

    That’s just part of it.

    A lot of times they heard about some property up the road that sold for X, so naturally the question becomes, “Why are you telling me mine is worth Y?”

    Well, because every tract is different.

    The other property may have had water or sewer. Maybe the frontage was better. Maybe the topo worked better. Maybe more of it was usable. Sometimes one side of the road is simply more desirable than the other. There are a hundred little things that can move value around.

    But the bigger thing to understand is the approach I take when I do these.

    I generally don’t ask ahead of time what your motivation is.

    Whether you want to sell immediately, inherited the property, are under pressure, or wouldn’t sell at all unless somebody got aggressive, I generally don’t build the analysis around that.

    Instead, I make a basic assumption.

    If you were what I’d call a sensible seller, meaning you are not under pressure to sell but you would sell at a reasonable market price, what would the property likely bring?

    That’s the framework.

    And all the comparable sales are there in the report. The relevant ones anyway. I try to show what sold, what didn’t, and explain why I came to the conclusion I did.

    Not a desperate seller.

    Not somebody demanding fantasy pricing either.

    Just somebody willing to make a reasonable deal if the numbers make sense.

    On a million-dollar transaction, that usually means you’re not going to blow the whole thing up over six hundred dollars on a survey when everything else is lined up correctly.

    Most legitimate transactions happen somewhere in that world.

    Does that mean somebody more aggressive might test the market higher?

    Sure.

    Does a more motivated seller sometimes take less for speed or certainty?

    Of course.

    That’s not really the point.

    The point is giving you a baseline grounded in what buyers have actually been willing to pay, instead of just whatever number happens to sound good that day.

    Then you decide whether you want to sell, wait, push harder on price, or ignore the whole thing for another five years.

    PS – Most landowners are not planning to sell right now.

    But situations change. Sometimes gradually, sometimes all at once. The people who already understand what they own usually make better decisions than the ones trying to figure it out under pressure.

    That’s what the MBR Land Reality Check is for.

    It looks at nearby sales, current competition, development activity, utility considerations, and the things that quietly affect value one way or the other.

    Is it a bad idea to know where things stand?

    Check it out.

    PPS- If you’re not ready for the Reality Check but like this kind of thinking, you can sign up below to get these in your inbox.

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