Selling your land
Land is harder to sell than a run-down house. We pay cash for it.
Not because nobody wants it, but because almost every buyer needs a loan and lenders are far more cautious about raw land than about a house. So parcels sit, and the tax bill arrives every year regardless. We pay cash, which takes the financing problem off the table entirely.
Vacant lots · Infill parcels · Acreage — across East Bay & Northern California, Nevada, Southern California.
Why it has not sold
Land is harder to sell than a house, and it is usually not your parcel's fault
A vacant parcel is often harder to sell on the open market than a run-down house, and the reason is almost never that nobody wants it. It is financing. Most buyers need a loan, and lenders treat raw land as a different and riskier proposition than a house: bigger deposits, shorter terms, higher rates, and plenty of lenders who simply will not write the loan at all.
So the pool of buyers who can actually complete shrinks to people paying cash. That is a much smaller pool than the one looking at houses, which is why parcels sit for months and sometimes years while the tax bill arrives every single one of them.
We pay cash, which removes the financing problem entirely. That is the whole of our advantage here — we are not claiming your land is worth less than you think, we are removing the reason it has not sold.
What we buy
The kinds of land we take on
Vacant residential lots
Single lots in established neighbourhoods, including ones left over when everything around them was built out. Often the simplest kind to price, because the comparable sales are right there.
Infill parcels
Awkward pieces inside a built-up area — odd shapes, difficult access, a strip left behind by an old subdivision. Difficult for a conventional buyer, which is exactly why they are still available.
Acreage and rural parcels
Larger pieces with wells, septic feasibility, outbuildings or agricultural history. Conventional financing struggles with all of it, and none of it stops us.
Land with a plan that stalled
A project that got part way — a survey done, a perc test, maybe permits pulled and then abandoned. The work already done has value and we will account for it rather than ignoring it.
We have not put a parcel-size or price band on this page, because the honest answer is that access and entitlement move the number far more than acreage does. Send the APN and you will get a straight answer on your parcel rather than a range that may not apply to it.
Not a fit
- Parcels in active boundary or ownership dispute, until that is resolved
- Land where the only access is disputed and there is no route to resolving it
- Timeshare and fractional interests, which are a different asset entirely
- Anything where the numbers only work if every approval goes the right way
If your parcel is outside this but you think we should look anyway, send it. A list is a starting point, not a rule we enforce against our own interest.
How land is priced
Four things decide the number, and acreage is not one of them
There is no scope of work on a vacant parcel, so what a house sale would settle with a repair estimate gets settled by these instead.
Legal access
Whether there is recorded legal access to a public road, or whether the parcel is landlocked and reached across somebody else’s property by habit rather than by right. This is the single biggest swing factor, and a landlocked parcel is a genuinely different asset from one with frontage.
Utilities
What is at or near the boundary — power, water, sewer, or the feasibility of a well and septic if not. The distance to a connection matters enormously, because running services to a parcel is expensive and it is the buyer who pays for it.
Zoning and entitlement
What the parcel is zoned for, what it is actually entitled to build, and how far through that process anyone has got. Entitled land and raw land with the same acreage are not comparable, and the gap between them is often most of the value.
The ground itself
Topography, drainage, flood and wetland designations, soil, and anything that makes a building envelope harder to find. A steep or wet parcel can be perfectly good land and still support far less than its acreage suggests.
What to send
Enough to price it properly
- The parcel number (APN) — usually enough for us to start from the county record
- Whether it has legal recorded access, or is reached across someone else’s land
- What utilities are at the boundary — power, water, sewer, or septic feasibility
- The zoning, and anything you know about what it is entitled for
- Any survey, perc test, soils report or title work already done
- What is owed: back taxes, liens, assessments
In practice the parcel number alone is enough to begin. The county record carries the boundary, the zoning, the assessed value and the tax position, and we would rather look that up ourselves than send you hunting for paperwork.
The one thing genuinely worth telling us up front is access, because it changes the number more than anything else and it changes it early. "Not sure" is a fine answer — what is not fine is us pricing a parcel as though it has recorded access and then revising once title says otherwise.
Do not go and commission a survey or a perc test on our account. If you have one it helps. If you do not, we work without it.
Why owners call us
What usually prompts it
You inherited it
Often a parcel nobody in the family has seen, in a county nobody lives in, with taxes quietly accruing. We buy inherited land and we work with title to sort out what is owed at closing.
The plan never happened
Bought to build on one day, and the day never came. Circumstances change and there is no sense paying to hold something you have stopped intending to use.
It came with something else
A parcel that arrived attached to another purchase, or was split off years ago and forgotten. You may not want it and may not know what it is worth.
The taxes have got ahead of you
Land produces no income and bills every year. If the arrears have built up, that is workable — it gets settled out of the proceeds at closing rather than by you beforehand.
It has been listed and nothing happened
Listed, viewed, and every interested buyer failed to get financing. That is the normal story with land, and it is exactly the problem a cash buyer removes.
You are done managing it from a distance
Dumping, fencing, weed abatement notices and a county you have to deal with by post. Owning distant land is a small ongoing job with no revenue attached to it.
Questions
What land owners ask
I only have the parcel number, not an address. Is that enough?
Yes, and it is often better. Vacant land frequently has no street address at all. The APN lets us pull the parcel boundary, the zoning, the assessed value and the tax position straight from the county, which is most of what we need to give you a sensible answer.
Why is land harder to sell than a house?
Financing, almost always. Lenders treat raw land as riskier than a house — larger deposits, shorter terms, and many will not lend on it at all. That shrinks the buyer pool to people paying cash, which is a fraction of the pool looking at houses. It is not usually a reflection on your parcel.
My parcel is landlocked. Will you still buy it?
Possibly, but tell us up front, because it changes the number substantially and it changes it early. Land with recorded legal access and land reached across a neighbour’s field by long habit are genuinely different assets. What we will not do is give you a number as though it has access and then revise it once title tells us otherwise.
There are back taxes on it. Does that stop the sale?
No. Back taxes, liens and assessments are settled out of the sale proceeds at closing through title, in the same way a mortgage would be on a house. You do not have to clear them beforehand and you should not try to.
Do I need a survey or a perc test first?
No. If you already have them, send them — they help and they may improve the number, because they remove uncertainty we would otherwise have to price for. If you do not have them, do not go and commission them on our account.
How long does a land sale take?
Often faster than a house, because there is no structure to inspect and no tenant to work around. The constraint is nearly always title — establishing clean ownership and access on a parcel that has not changed hands in decades can take longer than the sale itself. We will tell you honestly what it looks like once title has had a first look.
Before you sign anything
Who ends up buying it
Land is bought on the same terms as a house, and the same thing is true of it: most of the time we buy it ourselves, and occasionally a parcel suits another investor better and we assign the contract instead. Either way you are told which before you sign, in writing, and the price you agreed does not change.
The whole of that, in plain words →Get started
Tell us about the parcel
The other two
We do three things.
Which means when we tell you one of them is not right for your property, we have somewhere else to point you — and no reason to push you toward the wrong one.
Selling your house
You own a house and you want it sold
How it works →Property management
You want to keep the property and stop running it
See what we take on →For investors and wholesalers
You are in the trade — bringing us a deal, or wanting deal flow
See the buy box →Not sure which one you want? Call (925) 786-4066 and describe the property — you will get an actual opinion, including when it is neither.