A broker sent me 118 acres east of Centerville in March. Asking price was $3,450 an acre, so $407,100 for the whole tract. Leon County dirt, highway frontage on the north line, a creek cutting through the back half, post oak scattered across the front. On paper it was the best thing I had looked at all quarter. We spent eleven days and about $1,850 on due diligence and then we walked away from it. I still think that was the right call, and the reason is worth more than the deal would have been.
The sheet was clean. 118 acres, roughly 1,100 feet of frontage on Highway 7, a seasonal creek, one old stock pond, no house and no improvements to tear out. Ag exemption in place, so the tax bill was $640 a year instead of the several thousand it would run without it. The seller was a rancher in his seventies who had run cattle on it since 1994 and was ready to be done. Motivated seller, low taxes, paved frontage, priced under what the county was seeing. That combination is exactly what I hunt for.
When a deal reads that well this early, I have learned to slow down instead of speed up. Cheap is usually cheap for a reason, and the reason is almost never on the listing sheet.
I drove down on a Tuesday and walked it for about three hours. The front 40 acres were good. Sandy loam, gentle roll, the kind of ground a homestead buyer pictures when they say they want a place in the country. Then the grade drops off, and it drops fast. Past that break the whole back side flattens into bottom land.
Two things told on it. The silt lines on the tree trunks in the bottom were four feet up, which means water stands there and it stands deep. And the grass in the low ground was all bent the same direction, laid over flat like a comb ran through it. Dry creek that day. Did not matter. The land had already written down what it does in a wet spring.
Back at the truck I pulled the FEMA map on my phone, which is a five minute job I should have done before I ever drove out. 47 acres of that tract sit in the regulatory floodway. Another 22 acres sit in the 100 year floodplain. That leaves 49 acres of high ground out of 118.
Run the price against the useful dirt and the whole picture flips. $407,100 divided by 49 buildable acres is $8,308 an acre. Nobody in Leon County is paying that for raw ground. The tract was not cheap at all. It was expensive wearing a cheap price tag.
Here is how we valued it. Over the prior twelve months, high ground homestead tracts in the 10 to 25 acre range in that part of the county traded between $6,200 and $7,800 an acre. Floodway acreage moves too, but it moves as hunting and recreation ground, somewhere around $900 to $1,400 an acre.
So the blend looked like this. 49 high acres at $6,800 is $333,200. 69 wet acres at $1,200 is $82,800. Call it $416,000 retail, before survey, before subdividing, before entitlement work, before holding costs, before a real estate commission on the way out. Buying at $407,100 leaves nine grand of room and a year of work. That is not a deal. That is a job you pay to have.
We offered $258,000, which is $2,186 an acre. I told the broker exactly how we got there and sent the flood map with the offer, because I would rather a seller understand my number than think I am trying to steal from him. He passed. That is fine. He is allowed to want more than I am allowed to pay.
Two mistakes, both mine. First, I drove four hours round trip before spending five minutes on the flood map. That order is backwards and it cost me a day and a tank of diesel. Second, I told the broker we liked the tract before I had run the numbers. Nothing binding, just a friendly signal. But it cost me negotiating room, because once a broker hears enthusiasm, every number you say after that sounds like a bluff.
We flipped the sequence after that. Flood map first, then comps, then the drive, then any conversation about price. It has saved us two wasted trips since.
Forty days later we closed 84 acres west of Teague in Freestone County at $2,600 an acre, $218,400 total. Six acres in the floodplain, 78 acres high and dry, county road frontage on two sides, which is the detail that makes a split possible. We cut it into three tracts and had two under contract before the survey pins were even set.
That tract exists in our portfolio because we did not tie up our money in Leon County. Capital you did not spend is not a loss. It is the next deal, sitting there waiting on you.
None of that is complicated. All of it takes under two hours. And any one of the five can turn a good price into a bad buy, which is the whole point of running them before you fall in love with a place.
I am curious what your version of this list looks like. Everybody who buys dirt for a living has one, and most of us built it out of a deal that went sideways.
That 118 acres is still listed. Every month it sits there, I feel a little better about the eleven days we spent finding out why.