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?
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.
