Legal access, not a track
The commonest and costliest surprise.
Why cheap land is cheap
Legal access, zoning, utilities, flood zone, wetlands. It is nearly always one of those five.
How we work
Check the five things
Vacant land is the easiest real estate to buy badly, because almost nothing about a parcel is visible from a listing or a map. A track running to the boundary is not legal access. A dry-looking lot can be mapped wetland. Zoning may permit nothing the buyer had in mind, and the nearest water main may be half a mile away.
Those five questions decide most of the value, and all five can be researched from public records before anyone spends money. Disclosing the answers — including the ones that reduce what a parcel is worth — is the difference between selling land and selling a problem.
What no seller should ever do is promise buildability. Whether a house can go up depends on the permitting authority, septic percolation and wetland delineation, none of which belong to the seller. A buyer who hears a guarantee should treat it as a reason to walk away and survey the parcel first.
Our principles
Three beliefs behind the method
Disclose the bad findings
Including the ones that lower the price.
Never promise buildability
That is the county's decision, not ours.
Want to know about a parcel?
Send the parcel number and we will tell you what the records show.