Been doing this for a while now and I’ve gotten comfortable enough to move fast on most parcels. But access is the one thing that still slows me down. County GIS shows a road frontage, but half the time that “road” is a paper road that was never built, or it’s a two-track that technically crosses someone else’s land.
For the lower-priced stuff (sub-$10k), I’ve started just eyeballing the GIS and aerials and pulling the trigger without ordering anything. Saves time and the margins still work even if I’m wrong occasionally. But I had one recently where the access was way messier than it looked, and now I’m second-guessing how much I’m leaving to chance.
For those of you doing decent volume, where’s your line? Do you treat access differently based on deal size, or do you have a quick checklist that catches the landlocked ones before you ever make an offer?
methinks your instinct to second guess is the right one. eyeballing it under 10k is totally fine, the trick is just being honest about what you’re actually risking on each one. skipping the formal check is fine, skipping the 30 second gut check is what gets you.
for me it’s less about deal size and more about how bad the worst case is. a 5k parcel where worst case is a $400 survey is a totally different animal than a 5k parcel where worst case is it’s actually landlocked and worth nothing. same price, completely different risk. so that’s the thing i’m really looking at before i send anything.
the quick stuff i check is basically does it actually touch a real maintained road or just a line on the map, and does that match the aerial. if gis says road but the aerial is just trees with no cut through it, that’s a flag. and i always look for a neighbor parcel sitting between mine and the nearest real road, thats the classic landlocked setup and its usually pretty obvious once you turn the parcel lines on.
if all that looks clean i move. if anything’s murky i either price it low enough that an easement headache still leaves me whole, or i flag it to look closer before closing.
the one that burned you probably tripped one of those and you talked yourself past it cause the price was low lol. happens to everybody. the cheap ones are exactly what make us lazy.
ah yes, the classic “the margins still work even if I’m wrong occasionally” right up until the occasional one is landlocked and worth a crisp zero dollars lol. been there, it’s a great strategy until it isn’t.
look, GIS is a coworker who’s confidently wrong about 30% of the time and never tells you which 30%. that’s the whole problem. it’ll show you beautiful road frontage that turns out to be a paper road some surveyor doodled in 1962 and nobody ever built. trusting it blindly on the cheap stuff is fine as a numbers game, you’re just betting you’ll win more than you lose.
if you want the lazy-but-not-stupid version, it’s like 20 seconds. does the parcel actually touch a maintained road or just a line. does the aerial back it up or is it trees with no cut. is there a neighbor parcel wedged between you and the real road. if any of those are murky you either price it like it’s landlocked or you go look closer. not exactly a phd.