Vacant Land: Fill & Download for Free

My friend Jon Ernest asked me to answer this even though I don’t think he is the person who originally asked the question.For one…I wouldn’t call it a “plot”. Kind of an ugly sounding word. :)It really depends who your target audience is.If you are selling to private individuals who will hire a builder to build their home on that Building Lot, then you would advertise it with a sample floor plan and facade sketch to indicate the biggest and best house that would fit on that lot. They can always scale it down. But showing a picture of dirt and dead grass isn’t going to get anyone very excited. You need to show them a “reasonable facsimile” of the house that they can put on it to get the best price for the lot.If your target audience are the builders who may buy the land and then build and sell “spec” or custom homes before re-selling to the owner occupant buyers, then it’s really about negotiation more than advertising “technique”. There isn’t a builder worth his weight in doughnuts who can’t hold his own against any seller of land. You start on an uneven playing field because he knows HIS numbers better than anyone and each one will have a different colored pencil. A high end builder will have a much wider profit margin to play with than a builder of entry level housing.Generally, the more money someone can get for the eventual build out ON the lot, the more money you can get for the lot. It really is as simple as that.If it is Commercial Property or Multi/Mixed-Use zoning, the negotiation usually keeps circling back to the total number of units that can be built. Usually there is a discrepancy that requires a variance. As example, technically they can build 6 townhomes but everyone knows the buyer of the lot can fairly easily get a variance (after he owns the property and has a hearing on the actual permit filed) to build 7 or 8. The seller of the land can get more for it if he gets the price of 8 units than 6, but he can’t readily prove out more than 6. In this situation I tend to end up with the less experienced builder who is more interested in getting his hands on a project than competing with the other builders. In every town there are a handful of builders who seem to tie up all of the land before anyone even knows they are for sale.You want that one builder who never seems to find out first and always loses out and is HUNGRY for a project! He always pays the most…and by far. By putting a sketch of an actual house on the lot you can usually get permission from the mls to show it both in Residential AND in Vacant Land. Most everyone uses this method…at least those that do get Best Price. It’s the best exposure as you get a higher price from the least experienced who are also not as good at finding you.Short answer…you don’t call it a “plot” nor do you call it “vacant land”. You put a reasonable facsimile sketch and floor plan with the land (even though they are only buying the land) and then get it listed both as vacant land AND a residential listing that will show up with all of the other houses on Public sites.You need to flush out the highest price by seeking out the lesser known buyers. But unfortunately most agents go for the quick sale by calling the better known builders as highest price really isn’t their goal. They would rather dump all of the lots quickly on one builder that they know and try to work a deal to get the listings of the completed homes from that buyer. They tend to work more for themselves than the seller of the land, unless they already are guaranteed the eventual listings of the houses built on those lots…which is pretty much never at that point in the sale of land.Sad, but true.

They make offers.They have various methods of finding sellers who are likely to be motivated to sell. Maybe they’re “tired landlords.” Maybe out-of-town owners. Maybe they just feel they’re getting too old to manage properties. Maybe they’ve inherited the house. Maybe they’ve gotten some code violations on their property. Maybe they bought land, planning on building on it some day, and that day never came.Another answer here says most of his leads come off the MLS. While that doesn’t work particularly well where I am, that’s another source. Often, in addition to looking for properties described as “needs work” or “needs TLC” or “handmany special,” properties with long days-on-market are good prospects. Or vacant properties. Or expired listings.Once they’ve identified sellers who do—or may—fall into those categories, the investors market to them.Some will respond. The investor has done (often usually already did) enough research to know what would constitute a good deal. The investor makes an offer.The thing to remember is that a “motivated seller” usually isn’t motivated by price. Other factors—a quick sale, for instance—take priority over a higher price.And that’s how it works.

Quick-ish version here. TL;DR version below, including how I sold my first $276,000 house from 1996 to a Venture Capitalist for $700,000 in early 2001, which was also one of the most ridiculous things I’ve seen. Some of you may have read my answer to the question “have you ever been ignored in a luxury store because you didn’t look rich enough?” I wrote a story about buying a Mercedes with my husband. I teased you with this story about the house and I think one of you was gracious of enough to add this question to Quora so I could tell my story. Thank you!)The most ridiculous thing I did to buy a house was this: In 2000, I bought a museum-quality completely redone 2,200 sq ft (~220 m2) house in San Francisco’s Ashbury Heights neighborhood, just uphill from the Haight Ashbury — on margin — basically a loan against stock I owned but had not yet sold and turned into cold hard cash. The house was listed for $2 million. I offered 25% over the asking price and paid $2.5 million using a combination of cash and a margin loan. I wrote a check for the full amount and offered a closing escrow period of 5 days. My company had just gone public, and I had cash (and a margin account) and was planning to get a $1 million mortgage after the fact. The competition for housing was so great at the time in San Francisco, and again now in 2017–19 (before the next recession hits), that house sales were basically two-week silent auctions. “Moderately” priced houses (i.e., around $800k to $1.1 million) often got 40 offers, or more.The standard selling practice then and now in San Francisco was for the listing agent and the sellers to choose a listing price that they would accept (but often expecting offers over that price). The listing agent then put the house on the market, say for example, on Sept 1, often with a “coming soon” sign out front and a listing in the MLS a few weeks before. The listing agent also published a statement on the MLS about the bidding process, along the lines of “Offers will be reviewed on Tuesday, Sept 15, at 6pm. No offers will be accepted or reviewed before that date and time.” The Realtor then took photos, built a website, printed brochures, coordinated staging, spread the word to other Realtors, coordinated any necessary repairs, and did everything a good Realtor does to generate demand (and earn the 6% commission that they split with the selling agent (my agent) and their real estate company.)As part of this auction process, the listing agent schedules two Sunday open houses, two Tuesday “Realtor’s tours” (which anyone can visit), and also makes the house available any time for potential buyers to visit. Interested buyers can bring inspectors, crawl around, look for flaws, climb on the roof, crawl under the house, whatever. And that’s what we did. We knew exactly what we were bidding on and we loved it. (I use the singular pronoun most of the time, since I was the one with the bank account. Jordan was the house husband, but had a lot to do with decision making, especially veto power! :-)The sellers received a dozen offers on that house when that two-week deadline came. Three of the bidders offered the same $2.5 million price as me, 25% over the asking price. I won the bid for one crucial reason. I bid cash with a 5 day escrow. Actually I wrote two offers, each exactly the same — with one difference. The first offer included a $25,000 earnest money deposit, a non-refundable deposit to show that you’re serious. The balance would be wired to the escrow company. I included a copy of my brokerage statement with my offer to show that I had the cash and stock in the bank. There were no contingencies on the bid. A completely clean offer, with an escrow closing in 5 days. How could they say no?However, I had an idea, and told my buyer’s agent, Karen, (officially referred to as the “selling agent”) Karen had helped me buy my first house five years before in the Lower Haight. She was skeptical at first of my idea, but warmed up to it, and eventually grew to love the idea. I asked her, “What if I were to make the same exact offer, but instead of writing an earnest money deposit of $25,000, I just wrote a check for $2.5 million with the same 5 day closing?” Now really, how could they say no to that?!Indeed, they did say no. They countered the offer! But it’s not what you think. They said they couldn’t get their furniture out in 5 days, and countered with a 6 day closing. Lol. I graciously accepted. The sellers later told me that they chose my offer because it was clear that I had the money in the bank, my husband I were serious, and there were no contingencies, unlike the other three offers. Not unsurprisingly, they took the smaller check for $25,000. They didn’t want to be walking around with a check for $2.5 million in their pocket! Who can blame them?So that is the most ridiculous thing I have ever done to buy a house — I bought a museum-quality dot com mini-mansion with a three car garage on a margin loan using my unsold stock as collateral. In retrospect, buying a house on a combination of cash and margin (meaning, money that wasn’t actually mine yet, I owned the stock, but hadn’t sold it yet. If it went down in price, I’d be screwed). This was a year before the crash and was quite risky, but at the time, we all thought the sky was the limit. We got the keys 6 days later, I got on an airplane to Tokyo for work, leaving the house empty, planning to start the moving process when I returned.TL;DR version(And the ridiculous story below about selling my first house to venture capitalist and Silicon Valley legend, Tom Perkins, a very early employee and later chairman of Hewlett Packard and then founder of Kleiner Perkins (Google him), one of the first and most prestigious venture capital companies in the world.The Silicon Valley dot com boom of 1999–2000 was minting millionaires (on paper at least) left and right with Initial Public Offerings (IPOs). Some people got royally screwed by tax laws when the crash came in 2001, declaring bankruptcy or making offers in compromise to the IRS, but I was fortunate enough to escape that, barely. (Google [Alternative Minimum Tax, Incentive Stock Options, and unintended consequences] for some history, particularly articles written around 1999–2005, but articles written today are just as relevant.)The 20 person start-up I joined in 1996 went public in April 1999 at a split adjusted price of $48, it closed the first day at a split adjusted $120. (I was suddenly a millionaire, like winning the lottery, except I worked my ass off to help make the company successful. But it was a bit of “right place, right time” when I joined that start-up in 1996. Many people joined start-ups, worked their asses off, and came away with nothing, so I consider myself lucky.)My Incentive stock options (ISOs) were priced between $0.10 and $1.00, so I was in the money, at least for the 3-years worth of options that had vested. The stock peaked at a split adjusted $600 and began its decent in 2001, then dropped precipitously after 9/11, bottoming out at a price of $1.05 in 2003. When my employee black-out period ended and I was able to sell my options, I became a millionaire in the bank not just a millionaire on paper (although on paper I was a multi-millionaire with more options yet to vest).I had bought my first house in San Francisco in 1996 for $276,000, a small “Stick Style” 1,100 sq ft (110 m2) 1890s Victorian house that had had virtually no work done on it except an awful 1970s kitchen. Before the IPO, Jordan and I had hired an architect and had begun to plan a fairly significant remodel, including adding a staircase to get to the ground-level full-height ceiling “basement”, which was not connected internally to the upstairs two-bedroom main floor. The “basement” had a cement floor and exposed rafters, but the ceiling was high enough to be comfortable. The work would have required us to move out for 9 months (or 18 months, given how notoriously slow contractors can be.)Neither of us wanted to move out for 9–18 months and manage a contractor, though. After the IPO, however, Jordan had the bright idea of “let’s go see what’s already done and is ready to move into!” We frequently visited Sunday open houses as a sport to see the cool houses scattered all over San Francisco. (This was back when newspapers listed Sunday open houses, rather than having to search online for them.) So we went looking for something that was “done” and ready to move into. The first Sunday was Labor Day Weekend, which we hadn’t realized, so there was very little to see. The next Sunday, however, there was lots to see. We found a house we loved, and the rest is history.I called Karen, my buyer’s agent, and told her I wanted to make an offer on a house. She didn’t know we were looking, and I told her about my IPO and new-found wealth. She said, OK, we can start looking that week. I told her, no, we have the place in mind already, but she convinced us to at least look at a few others, so we placated her. No dice, we knew what we wanted.Interestingly, this is pretty much exactly how I bought my first house with Karen. She had showed us a bunch of properties, but we fell in love with a cottage on the back of a lot south of the Panhandle of Golden Gate Park, surrounded by greenery and gardens and protected from street noise. That house wasn’t the right fit for us, but we were smitten. That’s the only thing we wanted: a cottage in the middle of a city block, hidden from sidewalk view.After that, Karen, Jordan, and I kept our eyes peeled for such a house. I found it and visited a Sunday open house (this was a slow period of the market, so no silent auctions). I visited the open house on my own, walked beneath the Edwardian house in front to get to the rear, was astonished at the detail (see below), and explained to the listing agent that I already had an agent and would ask her to call. The listing agent asked who my agent was, so I told her, and wouldn’t you know, Karen’s business card was right in the listing agent’s hand. Karen had been there just a few minutes before me, knowing this was exactly what we were looking for.)(Side note: It wasn’t uncommon for these smaller Victorian houses and cottages to be pushed to the back of the lot on rollers and a team of horses, so that a new, bigger Victorian or Edwardian house could be built in front. These houses and cottages hidden in the middle of city blocks are everywhere in SF if you take your time to look on Google Earth or satellite view. In this case, the owners at the time pushed the rather nice Victorian to the back of the lot, probably around 1920 to build a four story, three-flat Edwardian in front. Victorian houses had fallen out of favor and looked dated to the modern eye back then. Eventually, small investors in the 1980s bought the two buildings on one lot as a TIC (Tenants in Common), with a total of four units, and then converted them to condos, putting three of them on the market. The fourth remains occupied to this day by one of those original investors from the 1980s.)The house was listed for $275,000 as is. It needed roof sealant, which I did not want to do, so negotiated up to $276,000 for the investors to coordinate the work. (Despite my infatuation with mid-block cottages, the house I really wanted was Valencia Street in the Mission at the base of Liberty Hill, however. It was a full three-story, four bedroom Victorian on the front of the lot, It was fabulous, except it was next to an auto body shop. It listed in 1996 for $285,000 but I didn’t qualify for that bigger loan. Both the Victorian and the auto body shop are still there. The Victorian hasn’t changed hands since 1981, but it’s estimated at $2.3 million now.)But back to my ridiculous dot com mansion purchase on margin in early 2000. The house was a Victorian in name only — just the front facade remained, plus double a parlor in front. The in-law studio, the bedrooms, the kitchen, the bathrooms were all state of the art. Balconies on the back had a peek-a-boo view of the tops of the Golden Gate Bridge towers and the Marin Headlands. The three car garage was spotless. The sellers had laid down fresh sod in the rear yard, which was only 23 by maybe 20 feet (7 meters by 6 meters) as part of their staging effort. First job — rip up the sod. Who needs a lawn mower for 450 square feet (45 m2).The front yard needed some work, but not a lot. One extraordinary feature though, was a beautiful wisteria winding around the front porch. It must have been at least 50 years old and with proper maintenance it never would have posed a problem no problem to the wood work on the porch. Like I said, that was 2000. In 1991 I rented an apartment on the same street a few blocks away and I remember that wisteria vividly. (I don’t remember a lot from then, but that was one.) The purple flowers bloomed first, with tiny hints of green leaves that eventually grew in with the flowers. Gorgeous! Each spring, we regularly had people knocking on our door asking what type of wisteria it was and could they take a picture. It was magical. Alas, when we sold the house in 2004, the idiot Realtor who bought it cut it down. The neighborhood was up in arms and I think they still resent her for it.But when it came time to sit down with Karen and write that offer (or rather two offers), I asked her, “What price should I bid?” Of course she asked “Well, how much do you have? How much can you afford?” My answer was “Heck, it’s like monopoly money, I just want this house. How much?” And that’s how we decided on 25% over asking price. Lol. (Now, now, no more comments from the peanut gallery about putting money away for the future — I did that, but alas, market crashes and AMT killed those savings. I tried. Besides, I have no kids, no nieces or nephews, and my husband and I divorced. There’s no reason for me to save money for some future generation a=or surviving spouse. My goal is to die penniless, but not a day earlier than I spend that last penny!)Eventually, we realized it really more house than we needed, although we had some pretty rockin’ parties there! I had been paying my $1 million mortgage by selling stock options — not paying from my salary, an untenable position that was becoming more untenable as the market dropped and dropped. Then 9/11 came. The stock market was closed for a few days and the powers that be warned us to not panic, don’t sell your stocks, they’ll be fine. Not me, I was on the phone with my broker first thing at 6:30 AM PDT when the market opened and I sold *everything*. The stock was at $15 at that point, and quickly fell to $10, then $5, then $1. I paid off most of my mortgage, refinanced, and then decided to move — to a bigger Victorian house in Alamo Square! Ha! We lost money on the dot com mansion, but we traded it for the bigger victorian for almost exactly the same reduced amount of the dot com mansion. It was an even trade, so I didn’t feel like I had lost money.The 1896 Alamo Square Victorian was in a rougher neighborhood (gun shots at night) but has now been gentrified significantly. (Remember hearing about $4 toast? It was in the national news after San Francisco lost its collective shit over that $4 piece toast. That place was just a block away after we moved out of that house.) It needed some work, but we were fine with the that. The main draw for that house was that it had not only an in-law studio in the basement we could rent, but also a really old Victorian cottage that had been pushed to the back of the lot and had been turned into two rental units.I know I’m going off on tangents, but I hope some of you find it entertaining.(Bear with me on this one, or skip ahead two paragraphs.) In San Francisco, you could request a “water inspection.” The purpose was to calculate your sewage bill (iknowright?). It’s probably the same in many cities, but your sewage bill assumed that some percentage of the water you used went into the sewers. In SF, the default was 95%. But if you had a yard and house plants, they would come to do an inspection of those plants, the assumption being that the water for the plants didn’t go down the drain. We had a lovely lush small yard with bamboo, tons of flowering plants, and some trees that our arborist called “Giant house plants”. I learned later they were a type of plant used to make Japanese paper, with leaves four to five feet across (120 cm to 15 cm). Raking the leaves was such a chore — picking up 5 or 6 leaves can e very tiring. Lol! The water inspector counted and recorded every single plant and reduced our sewer rate to 85%.But the coolest thing was that she had brought along the original work order from 1872 to install water to the original house in pencil on yellow paper with a diagram of the original house location and the work to be done — a horse trough, an outdoor sink, an indoor kitchen sink, and an indoor water closet. Those of you history buffs know that San Francisco lost most of its building permit records in the great fire of 1906 after the big earthquake. However, the water companies had not yet been consolidated, so virtually all of their records were saved, along with some insurance company maps. That’s how we know that our rental cottage in Alamo Square was from 1872, or before.Eventually we decided even that house was too much. We fixed it up and tried to sell it in 2010, but the market was still soft and we would not have made our money back, considering the cost of the house and the minor renovations we did. So, instead of selling it, we rented it to Googlers for $9,500 per month, moved to the Sunset where we found a great place for $2,500, and made money from the rent arbitrage, even after property taxes, insurance, and the smallish mortgage on the place. Advertising for tenants for that place and the two units in back was easy then — the Google buses had started by then. (“Google bus” being the generic term for any company bus that picked up employees in SF (or Santa Cruz, or San Leandro, etc.) to take them to their offices in Silicon Valley. No one wanted to live in the suburbs — SF was where it was at, and public transportation to get from SF to Silicon Valley was virtually impossible — and still is. Actually Genentech was the first with an employee bus, then Yahoo!, then Google, then Apple, HP, Netflix, and Roku. Renting was easy — I just had to list the employee bus stops nearby, since that was often the most important factor for many renters. 5 minute walk to Google stop, 3 minutes to Netflix stop, 6 minutes to Apple stop, etc.Eventually we sold that house in 2013 when the IRS’s limit of living in a house for two of the previous 5 years was coming up. Good thing we waited — it appreciated $1 million in 3 years!OK, enough of that ridiculous “buying a house on margin” and my various tangents.Here’s the story of the ridiculous purchase of my original house by Tom Perkins, of Kleiner Perkins fame. Those of us in Silicon Valley recognize tech celebrities, and I recognized Tom when he toured the house with some young kinda grungy skate punk. (Funny, I don’t recognize real celebrities at all. I once had a 15 minute conversation with Lenny Kravitz at a nice quiet bar, talking about single malts, the city, etc. I think he was just glad to not have someone fawning over him. I just didn’t recognize him, and if I had, I probably would have talked to him the same way. Meanwhile, my husband was looking on incredulously with a smirk on his face wondering when I would figure it out. But Silicon Valley celebs? Them, I know. I was agog when I ran into Craig Newmark at our local pizza joint in the Sunset. Craig who? Craig, founder of craigslist.org! Jordan never lets me live that down.)So, I bought this little 1100 sq ft (110 m2) Victorian house/condo on the back of a lot in 1996 for $276,000. When we had moved out, repainted, and put it on the market in early 2001 before the crash, we listed it for $476,000. Respectable, not outrageous, and I would have happily accepted an offer for that amount. We did the silent auction thing, and reviewed offers on a Tuesday night at 5pm. We got five offers for $276,000 (yeah, nice try), $476,000, $576,000, $685,014.82, and $700,000. The crazy $685k detailed offer down to the penny came with a letter from a young couple with a 2 year old child, saying it would be a perfect place to raise a child. Jordan and I disagreed — the yard was cement and the floor had nails sticking up from below. It would have been a terrible place for a toddler, IOHO! The $700k offer, however, came with a letter from Tom Perkins’ banker, explaining who Tom Perkins was (yes, I know) and that he was interested in buying the house. We knew he had the money, so that’s the offer we accepted. But why buy this house? He’s rich enough to have a condo in the Four Seasons or anywhere in the world!But that’s not the ridiculous part. Tom had bought the house for this 30-something skate punk to live in. The ridiculous part is that I later met the skate punk when I stopped by the house to give him my forwarding address and phone number (which he never used). Let’s call him Gerardo, it was something like that. I asked Gerardo why Tom bought this house for him. Gerardo said Tom had hit him with his car while he was skate boarding and it was a “thank you for not suing me” gift. But that’s not how rich people operate. They just write a check. They don’t go looking at half-run-down cottages with skate punks named Gerardo. Jordan’s theory was that the young man was a kept boy and they were having an affair. That seemed unlikely to me. If they were having an affair, Tom would have put the boy toy up in a fancy condo somewhere.My theory is that Gerardo was a love child that Tom had lost track of, but Gerardo had found Tom. This was a “shut up and be quiet” gift. Tom was happily married then (now deceased, RIP) and of he course didn’t want little Tom Jr.’s running around town!And I have a confession to make. The mailbox for that condo was one that you could reach into with a skinny hand (like mine) and pull out the mail. I did that a few times on tipsy walks home from the bars. Usually I pulled out mail with MY NAME on it that had never been forwarded. But once, it was a brokerage statement from UBS to Gerardo. I couldn’t keep myself from opening it (I wonder what the statute of limitations is on opening mail addressed to someone else? Whew, 5 years. I’m safe, but I still feel a little guilty.) When I opened it, it was basically a big credit card statement for one of Tom Perkin’s UBS accounts, with a copy sent each month to Gerardo. And the credit card charges were eye popping! Gerardo was buying first class airline tickets to Paris! Jewelry at Tiffany! Crazy shit like that! If that’s not a love child, I don’t know what is.Anyway, Gerardo eventually remodeled the house, as Jordan and I had planned to do. However, he left out the internal staircase. He put in a great master suite and bathroom downstairs, a media room, a small kitchen, etc. But you still had to go outside to get from upstairs to downstairs. They weren’t renting it out, they were using it! Upstairs, they just over did it. Not only did they lose the charm of the basic Victorian interior, they made it unrecognizable! And yet, a few years ago it sold for $1.3 million.And that is the most ridiculous thing I have seen someone else do to buy a house — purchasing a condo for a likely love child, but using the excuse that it was a “thank you for not suing me” gift. Ha.And if you made it this far, thank you for reading. Next up, if you ask nicely again, I’ll tell you about the four acres of vacant land we bought in Abiquiu, New Mexico, famous as the village where Georgia O’Keefe spent much of her later years. Many of her paintings, particularly the ones from Ghost Ranch, were painted right within a few miles of our land. But the land and the transaction were crazy — it was on a river (a real river) so the land was green and fertile. When they dug the well, they hit water at 6 feet (190 cm), but drilled to 20 feet (6m) just to be safe, the real estate agent used white out on the sales contract (true! I almost flipped my wig!), and the title company included some weirdo clause that they wouldn’t cover. No one could explain it to me, other than “it’s in all the title reports around here, just ignore it.”) But I did the research and found out the story is juicy — it involves the King of Spain, an executive order from Teddy Roosevelt, and because executive orders are reversible by any future president, the possibility exists that 45 could reverse it, blow it up, and cause havoc on a mind-boggling scale for a large portion of New Mexico and other states given to (taken by) the US after the Mexican American war in the 1850s!Ask something like “What was the weirdest or most egregious real estate transaction you have ever been involved with.”TTFN!Tim