- Well hello, this is Seth.
Hope you're having a great day today.
In this video I wanted to
give you a quick overview of
one way to evaluate any new market
when you're considering pursuing that area
for the purpose of buying vacant land.
And whenever I do this,
there's actually a lot of different things I look at.
But one of those things
that just gives you a really good idea
of what property values are
and what properties are likely to sell for in that area,
is to look on a website like Zillow.
And as you probably know,
there are several websites like Zillow in the world.
Like there's Redfin, there's Trulia,
forsalebyowner.com, realtor.com, landwash.com,
there's all kind of websites
where you can get the same kind of information.
But the reason I like Zillow
is because I have found that they serve the most markets,
they have the most data,
they have the best mapping and filtering functionality,
that just makes it really, really easy
to see exactly what you want
in a very user-friendly, easy to understand manner.
And it also gives you a lot of contact information
for people who can potentially help you.
So let's take a look at kind of a random county
in the middle of Minnesota called Morrison County.
And I'm literally just picking this random,
I have no particular reason for searching this one,
it's a county I happen to know of
and it's a rural county
and let's just see what kind of data we can find there.
Okay, pull this up.
And do a search.
And when you do this search,
this is the kind of thing you're going to initially see.
And what you want to do is,
first of all, go up here where it says listing type.
And we're going to just check
the properties that are currently for sale,
and then importantly, as well,
are the ones that are recently sold.
'Cause this tells us properties that have actually sold
for these prices.
After that we're gonna go over here to home type.
We're going to
just make sure that the lots and land are checked.
And then we're gonna go over here to more
and let's put 45,000 to 500,000.
And that's basically the size range between
a one acre and ten acres. Approximately.
So now you can see all these little dots out here
are all the properties that have sold,
those are the yellow ones,
or the red ones are the ones that are currently listed.
And another thing we can do here is
go over here and click on where it says cheapest,
and that's gonna make sure it's just
showing us the cheapest properties first.
So we can just kind of understand the bottom of the barrel.
If we owned a property in this market today,
what we could feasibly expect to list it for
and maybe even sell it for.
And let's just go check out one of these yellow ones
and just see.
Okay, this is like a 2.73 acre lot.
This one sold, I'm actually recording this as of
June 5, 2016, and this sold about a month ago
for 22,000 dollars.
And this is 2.73 acres.
And it doesn't give me a ton of information beyond that,
but it does give me a sale price and a date
and the actual size of the property.
So that's pretty helpful to know.
We can also go check out this yellow one here,
another 2 and a half acre lot.
This one sold for 35,000.
And just looking at these ones here
that are listed here for a pretty cheap price,
this one here is a 1.75 acre lot listed for 5,000 bucks.
That's pretty cheap.
And then there's another one here,
2.78 acres for 7,500 bucks.
And what exactly is this telling us?
Like why is this even important and helpful to see?
Well, it's basically going to give you
some kind of idea for what price range
properties are being listed for and sold.
So if you did buy, you know, a one acre property
for 500 bucks, this is the approximate
sale price you could expect to get for it.
And does this tell you anything definitive?
No, not really.
But, what it does do,
is it gives you some sort of ballpark idea
for what you can expect to sell properties for
in this general vicinity.
And you can just scroll around and look at other properties
and just get other ideas
for what other properties are going for
to the north and to the south.
And what I like about this particular area
is that it's not too far from Minneapolis.
And that's typically what we want,
is a rural area that's within like a one to two,
maybe three hour drive from the nearest big city.
And that's really what all of this is.
Another thing you can keep in mind here is that
for any one of these properties, if you click on it,
something you're always going to see in these listings
is over here to the right,
you're going to see some local agents
and especially the listing agent.
So this guy right here,
this is the listing agent for a vacant lot in this area.
It gives us somebody
who is familiar with land in that area.
And we can give him a call and just ask him questions like,
tell me about vacant land sales in this particular county,
or city, or municipality.
Is vacant land something that sells quickly these days?
Like is the building market on fire
or is it completely dead?
What kind of a demand is there
for land in this area right now?
And you don't necessarily have to do this
but it's just another way to go the extra mile.
If you're really curious about
researching how vacant land is selling,
you can just find out.
Okay, so if this property is listed for 30,000 dollars,
do you think this is gonna sell in a week?
Or six months? Or five years?
Like, how quickly would land actually sell
at that kind of price?
And when you have these kind of conversations
they can be really helpful, just in educating you
about what the vacant land market looks like
in this area at this time, if you decide to pursue it.
Is it gonna be an area
where it's really easy to sell this land?
Or is it gonna be more of a challenge?
And are you gonna have to offer all kinds of incentives
and really low prices and seller financing
just in order to get somebody to be interested in it?
Zillow is just a wealth of information.
And again, there are several other websites
like this out there.
But I think Zillow just happens to be the one that,
at this time anyway, just has the
greatest quantity of data and information
that's really going to put it all in one place
and package it in an easy way for you to work with.
And it's all free.
So, if you're thinking about exploring a new market
in terms of buying vacant land there,
I think checking out Zillow
and just seeing what the numbers look like,
what the sales look like,
and even having a couple conversations
with those realtors in those areas
can be really enlightening.
And just sort of help you understand
what's going on there before you really
decided to jump into it with both feet.
This is all stuff
that you're gonna have to get familiar with anyway
when you actually get into that market
and start buying and selling properties,
so you might as well do it
before you start spending any money,
just so you kind of understand what you're working with
and what you're walking into.
So be sure to check Zillow out
and I wish ya'll the best as you're moving forward.