Buying the parcel is the easy half. Here is how we move land once we own it, from the buyers-list text that goes out before the deed records to the marketplace listings that catch everyone else.
By Zeeshan S. ·
This guide is the detail behind a service I run for clients. If you would rather hand it over than do it yourself, see Land Investor Marketing.
Short answer: price it to sell rather than to maximise, text your own buyers list before the parcel is publicly listed, offer owner financing to triple the buyer pool, list on the two or three marketplaces where land buyers actually look, and feed the listing into the local Facebook groups and agent networks that cover that county. In our experience most parcels that sit for months are sitting because of price or because the only marketing was a listing on one website.
Everything below is about undeveloped rural and infill land — the parcels a land flipper buys at a discount from an absentee owner and needs to resell within weeks, not the development sites that trade through brokers.
Price. Land has no comps in the way houses do, so sellers anchor on what they hope for. The parcels that move inside 30 days are typically listed at 60 to 75 percent of what similar lots are asking — not selling for, asking, because most of those asks are stale. A land buyer scrolling LandWatch is comparing you against every other lot in the county. Being the obvious value in that list is the whole marketing strategy; everything else just gets eyes on it.
Terms. Offering owner financing — a modest down payment and monthly payments over a few years — opens the parcel to buyers who will never get a bank loan on raw land, which is most of them. The buyer pool for a $20,000 parcel at cash is small; the pool for the same parcel at $1,500 down and $300 a month is enormous. Most of the fastest land sales I have seen were terms deals, and the note is often worth more than the cash sale would have been.
Sort those two out first. Marketing a mispriced cash-only parcel harder just produces more people who look and leave.
The fastest sale is to someone who already told you they buy land in that county. Building that list is the same work as building a motivated seller list, pointed the other way: cash buyers pulled from recent land transactions in the county, investors who replied to previous listings, people who asked about a parcel that had already sold, and the wholesalers who work the area.
The moment a parcel is under contract — before closing, before it is listed anywhere — the list gets one text. Same rules as a seller text: short, specific, a question at the end.
Hi {FirstName}, {YourName} here. Picking up {Acreage} acres off {Road} in {County} — {PriceShort}, terms available. Want the details before it goes on the market?
“Before it goes on the market” is the hook. Buyers on a list stay on it for exactly that reason.
A list of a few hundred real land buyers in a county will sell a well-priced parcel more often than not without the parcel ever being listed. It is also the channel that compounds: every listing you run adds the people who enquired to the list for the next one. The same SMS platform and compliance discipline that runs the seller side runs this; buyers who enquired about a listing have engaged with you, which puts you on much firmer ground than cold outreach.
Land buyers do not search Zillow first. They search the dedicated land sites, and for rural parcels two of them matter far more than the rest.
| Site | Best for | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| LandWatch / Land.com network | Rural, recreational, acreage | Paid listings; the network (LandWatch, Land.com, LandAndFarm) syndicates together. Where serious rural buyers start. |
| Zillow (via MLS or FSBO) | Infill and near-town lots | Huge audience but land is buried; works for lots a homeowner might buy, weak for 40 acres of nothing. |
| Facebook Marketplace | Cheap parcels, terms deals | Free, local, fast, and full of tyre-kickers. Still produces real buyers for sub-$30k lots. |
| Craigslist | Local cash buyers, older demographic | Declining but not dead in rural counties. |
| Your own site | Terms deals, repeat buyers | A simple property page with photos, map and a payment calculator; every other channel links to it. |
What makes a listing work on any of them is the same: a drone photo or at least a clear ground-level shot (a satellite screenshot reads as “seller never visited”), the exact GPS pin, road access and power stated plainly, the county's zoning in one line, what the parcel can be used for, and the terms option in the first paragraph if there is one. Listings that leave the buyer to ask about access and power get half the enquiries of listings that answer up front.
Every rural county in the United States has at least one “{County} buy sell trade” group and usually a land-specific one for the state. These are free, local, and the members are exactly the people who buy a cheap parcel to hunt on, park an RV on or build a cabin on. Post the listing with photos and a plain description, answer every comment within the hour, and expect the group to find you a buyer for small parcels faster than the paid sites do.
Two cautions. Groups ban obvious dealers quickly, so post as a person selling a parcel, not a company. And Facebook enquiries are low-commitment; qualify them by phone the same day or they evaporate.
In most rural counties there are two or three agents who sell most of the land, and they have buyers waiting. A short email or call offering a buyer-side commission — three percent is standard, five on cheap parcels moves them faster — puts your parcel in front of people you will never reach yourself. Wholesalers and other land investors in the county are the other half of this channel: offer them a referral fee or a JV on the spread, and your parcel becomes part of their marketing too.
If the parcel is worth listing on the MLS, a flat-fee listing service gets it there for a few hundred dollars without giving up a full listing commission. For parcels above roughly $40,000 that is usually worth doing.
The single most overlooked buyer for a rural parcel is the person who owns the parcel next to it. They know the land, they already deal with the access road, and adding acreage to what they have is an easy decision. A letter or a text to each adjacent owner — the names are on the county's GIS map — costs almost nothing and sells a surprising share of odd-shaped or landlocked parcels that no marketplace buyer wants.
Run that way, a correctly priced rural parcel with terms available should have an accepted offer inside 30 days in most markets. The parcels that take six months are almost always the ones listed on one site at a hopeful price with no terms and no follow-up.
The buyers-list build and the SMS to it, the marketplace and Facebook listings, and the enquiry follow-up are all things my team runs for land investors so the investor's time goes to finding the next parcel. The land investor marketing page explains what that looks like and what it costs; the land flipping vs wholesaling guide covers the acquisition side.
Tell me the county and the price point and I will tell you which of these channels will move it and what the marketing should cost.