Twenty years of my own closings, and what they actually teach

What land sells for

228Land closings
16,002Acres
2006–2026Years

Navarro County land

What twenty years of closings will tell you

228 land closings between 2006 and 2026, almost all of it in Navarro County and the counties touching it — what buyers actually paid me and what sellers actually took. Not a market average and not an estimate from a website.

I do not print a price per acre on a web page. Two tracts the same size a mile apart are not the same property, and a number on a screen gets used as if they were. The road, the water, the exemption and who is buying that month move it further than the acreage does. What the record does tell you, it tells you plainly, and it is below.

Land only — houses and commercial buildings are left out, because a house on two acres wrecks any per-acre comparison. Acreage is the deeded or surveyed figure carried on each closing. If you want the number for your tract, ask me and I will show you the closings I got it from.

The first thing the record says

Bigger tracts sell for less per acre

Every size band shows it, in every period I have closings for. A hundred-acre tract does not bring what ten acres brings, acre for acre — lately it has been closer to a fourth of it. The buyer pool is the reason: many more people can buy ten acres than can buy a hundred, and the ones who can buy a hundred are counting cattle and hay, not weekends.

This is the single most common thing sellers of large tracts get wrong, and it is the argument I have most often. It is not my opinion. It is what my own closings did.

The second thing the record says

Twenty years moved the price a long way

A twenty-to-fifty acre tract in this county sold for about 3.3 times as much per acre in the last few years as it did before 2013. Every band moved the same direction. What that means in practice: a comparable sale from even five years ago is history, not a price, and a valuation built on one will be low.

And it cuts the other way on the old sales people bring me. A price from the first half of this record is not what your land is worth. It is what it was worth, and the distance between then and now is the whole point of saying so.

Why there is no single number

Why no two tracts price alike

  • Road frontage. Paved county road frontage and a mile of gravel easement are two different properties at the same acreage.
  • Water. A tank that holds through August, a creek that does not, a water meter at the road or a well to drill.
  • What it is used for now. Ag exemption in place, hay meadow, timber, or twenty years of nothing and a fence to rebuild.
  • Who is buying that week. A neighbor adding to a place pays differently from somebody arriving from a city, and both of them show up in this record.

Any one of these moves a tract further than its acreage does. That is the conversation, and it is a short one.

What would yours bring?

Tell me the acreage, the county and what the road and the water look like, and I will tell you what it should bring and show you the closings behind the number.

Ask what your land is worth