Seattle
Valued Senior Member
I've got my agent trained pretty well. He finally understands that I'm not going to quickly be selling for a low price. I'll take it off the market before I drop it past a certain point.Have you thought of offering finance to the buyers?
Are you sure the offer was legit?
If thru an agent always be suspicious.. One thing that went on and ticked me off was "vendor conditioning"...a constant process to wear down the vendor and constantly reduce the price..if you have an agent and they are saying drop the price get back to me as I may be able to suggest a plan.
I did well because I really represented my vendor..I constitently got prices the other agents could not believe.
Most agents are not worth feeding as they think only price..anyways I could write a book...
Your best buyer will be adjoining owners.. you probably could strike a deal where you spread the price somehow..or a fix a low price and a high interest to spread you tax...
Alex
I'm not interested in seller financing however. I want the funds to reinvest not to have a 10 year loan with a balloon at the end or an even longer contract. If I was going to do that I'd just keep the farm land.
I can take the full proceeds and put it into dividend stocks and do much better than I currently do with land rents. Sure the land appreciation and timber sales (every 30 years) are fine but I'm now at an age when I want cash flow and easy access to the principal. I don't have kids to leave this to.
I could actually do all that even at the first offer but if I'm going to have an agent (and I negotiated a good commission with him) then I'm going to try for top dollar and give the market enough time to find the right buyer and not the first buyer.
I've sold smaller pieces of land before. I've also sold enough things on Ebay (totally unrelated of course) to know that when you have few buyers you don't need to lower the price. What you need is more buyers. If you aren't getting any offers after a lot of marketing then you might need to consider lowering the price.
If it's a specialty item and most people aren't even aware that it's for sale, that's the problem and not the price. The local farmers/land owners are the best potential buyers. I agree with that. Not many of them are flush with cash. I'm looking for those that are of course. Someone could want to build a home there as well as farm or rent out the land. There is hunting potential as well. The location is good as far as access (frontage along a state highway).
I even have some potential among family members and the operation that I'm currently renting my land to. People you know don't offer the highest price without seeing that others are offering those prices. When I turned down a $420,000 offer some of those other people started to take my pricing more seriously as well. It's also important IMO to have a high price that is realistic that you can negotiate down from. It can't be a price not based on reality but it can't be the price that you actually want to sell at because no one pays the listed price without feeling they could have done better.
I have time to play the long game.