Land Company wants to buy my place

[EastWest Gal]

I have received multiple letters offering to buy our orchard in California. Usually they are companies out of another state, and they offered about 1/10th the value of the orchard when it was appraised 15 years earlier. The land was fallow for about 2 years as we were replanting the orchard. That was when all the bogus offers started. I guess they thought we were in financial trouble. We just wanted a more valuable type of almond and newer, more productive trees.

 

[street]

I have received multiple letters offering to buy our orchard in California. Usually they are companies out of another state, and they offered about 1/10th the value of the orchard when it was appraised 15 years earlier. The land was fallow for about 2 years as we were replanting the orchard. That was when all the bogus offers started. I guess they thought we were in financial trouble. We just wanted a more valuable type of almond and newer, more productive trees.

I bet that is a very highly valued piece of land. It is very hard for me to put a price/value on something you enjoy and worked hard for to get. In my case I would much rather hand it down to granddaughter to be principals of it someday.

 

[Ronstar]

My 3 work partners and I bought our office building in 1996. And some surrounding vacant commercial lots. A local investor started making offers to purchase our building around 2005. We always said no. The investor kept making offers, always increasing the amount of his offer. Finally as we got older and started retiring, we gave in and sold the property to him.

Some prospective buyers don’t understand that sometimes conditions exist where an owner doesn’t want to sell regardless of how sweet the offer is.

 

[Time2]

We get several envelopes or postcards each month from the, we buy houses people, but they are there to lowball on any house they purchase. Send out 20,000 letters if one or two are successful, they win. I'm on the Florida Panhandle, lots of people moving here, crazy building going on, traffic is not like the sleepy town I moved to 32 years ago.

 

[Dawg52]

When I bought my patio home 10 years ago the real estate market was still depressed around here. The house was on the market for 3 months before i became interested in moving. I got it below the original selling price when it was built 7 years earlier. Not long ago I had someone knock on the door offering to buy it w/o even seeing the inside. Houses now sell on my street within a couple of days. You hear similar stories everywhere now tho.

 

[athena53]

We get the letters offering to buy our vacant land all the time. They are ridiculously underpriced. We have ~3 acres on prime waterfront with ocean access and is realistically worth about 150-250K on the real estate market. Our tax value is around 90K. The offer letters we get are for 20K. It's become a running joke in our household to look at the offer letters and guess the underbid price it will contain before chucking it in the trash.

Are you sure about the current value? Given the risks of hurricanes for most oceanfront property and the (justifiably) high cost of insurance I can't believe people still want to build there. My late parents dropped windstorm insurance on their little home in Myrtle Beach (they'd paid cash for it and had the resources to go elsewhere if it blew away) and my sister and BIL moved from Hilton Head further inland when their property insurance was costing them $8K/year- and that was maybe 15 years ago. Neither property was oceanfront.

 

[OK EE]

Are you sure about the current value? Given the risks of hurricanes for most oceanfront property and the (justifiably) high cost of insurance I can't believe people still want to build there. My late parents dropped windstorm insurance on their little home in Myrtle Beach (they'd paid cash for it and had the resources to go elsewhere if it blew away) and my sister and BIL moved from Hilton Head further inland when their property insurance was costing them $8K/year- and that was maybe 15 years ago. Neither property was oceanfront.

We're not on the beach, we're inland a little ways. Yes, hurricanes are a risk, but not wash the house into the ocean type risk. Mostly just flooding of older homes not built elevated, and wind damage. New construction is mostly immune to these risks due to revised building codes.

There are also several comps sold recently that show a rapidly increasing property value. It's in a rural area, I'm guessing it's mostly out of staters like us that are buying their dream retirement location. I have family in the area so it has appeal to us from that standpoint too.

I agree with beachfront property. I don't think you can even get mortgaged on those. I get the appeal but buying a 50 year home you know will be destroyed eventually seems kind of bizzare.

 

[Koolau]

Yes, but also the legit ones make for a quick easy transaction. No contingencies. No inspections. No "our financing fell through". No "you need to paint the railing and tighten that wobbly door knob". Just "here's the money" and you're done. That has a lot of appeal to me. Our house is a single-digit percentage of our net worth. If and when we want to sell it, I wouldn't have a problem with getting 100-150K under market value to have a clean simple transaction.

But if you're the owner who always made sure the door knobs aren't wobbly and then demand a big enough earnest money - not contingent on financing, you don't need to sell as if your place is "as is condition."

Price your place right and don't deal with the nit-pickers. Somebody said "Just say no." I think that wise if you're selling top-notch properties at a fair price.

 

[folivier]

IMO a house inspector will want to have enough items on his report to justify his expense. Lots of times these are loose doorknobs. Not something I'd even try to negotiate on but there are some buyers that will. On our last home sale the inspector listed an area of aluminum fascia that had a couple barely noticeable dents from a ladder when I installed cameras. Inspector said the wood behind it was rotten and entire fascia needed to be replaced. It was not but became a contentious issue because of this. Buyer also wanted all of the fascia replaced since he said it wouldn't match all of the other. We strongly refused.

 

[Koolau]

IMO a house inspector will want to have enough items on his report to justify his expense. Lots of times these are loose doorknobs. Not something I'd even try to negotiate on but there are some buyers that will. On our last home sale the inspector listed an area of aluminum fascia that had a couple barely noticeable dents from a ladder when I installed cameras. Inspector said the wood behind it was rotten and entire fascia needed to be replaced. It was not but became a contentious issue because of this. Buyer also wanted all of the fascia replaced since he said it wouldn't match all of the other. We strongly refused.

We hired an inspector when purchasing our last property. He apparently ignored all the windows and it happened that each window needed to be repaired in order to operate correctly. Every window cost $450 to fix! We were most disappointed in our inspector - that we paid for.

 

[joesxm3]

I have not gotten an offer to buy my land, but yesterday I had an email (which I did not read) that seemed to be someone wanting to make an offer to buy the company I used to work for.

Maybe I should have paid more attention. When the company was last acquired it was valued at $13B. If I could have sold it to them it would have been a nice bump to the nest egg

 

[COcheesehead]

When we sold our house last March, the buyer didn’t even do an inspection. We knew and so did our realtor that inspectors will always try and justify their fee, but the buyer didn’t seem to care. I guess the house looked great and that’s all that mattered.

 

[Trailwalker]

When we sold our house last March, the buyer didn’t even do an inspection. We knew and so did our realtor that inspectors will always try and justify their fee, but the buyer didn’t seem to care. I guess the house looked great and that’s all that mattered.

Same for us when we sold last summer. There was a bidding war among four buyers. We didn't take the highest offer; we took the second highest one with no contingencies whatsoever. Not worth it to have a sale tripped up over home inspections, well and septic inspections, radon inspections, etc. The highest bidder said that they would never do the sale without a home inspection. I understood completely. I wouldn't either, but those were the market conditions.

 

[disneysteve]

I don’t know how they gather their data for sending the offers but our daughter often gets offers for our house, which she doesn’t own. Once I got an offer for my mother-in-law’s house. I have no idea how they connected me to that property. Maybe I should have taken the deal and sold the place.

You would think the property owner would be public record and they could filter their data accordingly.

 

[street]

Another letter yesterday from the same Land Company out of Colorado wants to buy my place. They are offering a fair price it would be 2.5 times more then what I paid for the whole place.

But NO Thanks. I could sell it my self for 6 times without any middleman if I wanted. Again they would subdivide and sell parcels for huge dollars. I just hope the few ranchers that border me don't sell.

 

[Ronstar]

Another letter yesterday from the same Land Company out of Colorado wants to buy my place. They are offering a fair price it would be 2.5 times more then what I paid for the whole place.

But NO Thanks. I could sell it my self for 6 times without any middleman if I wanted. Again they would subdivide and sell parcels for huge dollars. I just hope the few ranchers that border me don't sell.

I hope your neighbors aren't persuaded like the farmers around here - farms being sold for big dollars for solar farms and data centers.

 

[street]

I hope your neighbors aren't persuaded like the farmers around here - farms being sold for big dollars for solar farms and data centers.

World is all about money, heritage and legacy, is starting to not be a thing anymore.

 

[Hyper]

Sadly, they prey on the desperate. I've also found from Reddit that sometimes they delay till they find someone else willing to buy it from them immediately so they're just the middlemen.

We developed a sub division years ago where an individual signed a contract with us to buy a five acre lot but wanted to wait three months to close.
We said sure, no problem then watched as he showed the lot to other potential buyers during that three months period.
Kinda pi$$ed me off but regardless we had earnest money he'd lose if he backed out.
At the time we were building a home in a lot before the lot he had a contract on and he wanted to split the cost of running electric to the lots with us when we ran the electric power.
It would cost us the same so wasn't a big deal to me until I found he was showing the property while we owned it.
So we installed our power without him which was secondary as we had a power pole close enough.
After he had bought the property, he had to install primary power because of the distance which cost him substantially!
I knew exactly how it would work but since he wanted to be a snake, he paid the price!!