Mastering Broker Price Opinions for Land: A Guide for Land Brokers

Crafting a broker price opinion (BPO) for rural land requires a mix of expertise, analytical skills, tactical decision-making, and knowing where to find high quality data. Done right, your BPO approach can help you attract more sellers, set competitive listing prices, and ensure properties move quickly while maximizing results for your seller.

Here's a strategic roadmap to refine your BPO process, with a special focus on leveraging Acres to find the latest and most accurate land sales data available.

Mastering Market Intelligence

Successful BPOs require a deep understanding of your local land market. Mastery here isn't just beneficial; it's imperative. It requires you to not only grasp the current state of play—ranging from zoning nuances to environmental considerations—but also to anticipate market trends. This level of market intelligence is the ultimate show of expertise and helps build trust with potential sellers.

Because land values are so nuanced, it's important to understand all the regional idiosyncrasies that impact price, like:

• Zoning
• Environmental considerations
• Water access
• Road access
• Flood zones
• Easements
• Proximity to amenties
• Views and topography

Understanding the ins and outs of your regional market will also help you select relevant comparable sales, which we'll get into in the next section.

Tactical Selection of Comparable Sales

Selecting the right comparable sales is where your expertise truly shines. It's a strategic exercise in identifying properties that not only share similarities with your subject property but also embody the competitive landscape.

This process is less about finding exact matches and more about understanding the strategic nuances that influence value. Adjusting for differences ensures your pricing strategy is not just a number but a reflection of strategic market positioning.

Of course, you still have to find reliable, accurate sales data, and in the rural land market, that can be a challenge. That's where Acres comes in.

Leveraging Acres: A Strategic Asset

Acres is a GIS and land research platform that brings together your property data and marketing needs into one nationwide subscription.

Our bread and butter? A nationwide curated sales database that's updated weekly and includes rich contextual details about each sales. And yes, we do offer coverage in non-disclosure and partial disclosure states.

Here's how you can deploy Acres to sharpen your tactical edge when it comes to creating broker price opinions for rural land:

• Find Relevant Comparable Sales Fast: Acres not only provides filters for price range, dates, and location but also for crop types, soil scores, and water districts (in California and Nebraska). This helps you narrow results fast so you can focus on evaluating the most relevant sales.
• Build and Export Shareable BPOs: Once you find relevant sales, you can quickly build a valuation report for a market area or a subject property directly from the plat map. The report will be based on your research, not an AVM.
• CSV Exports: If you prefer to work from a spreadsheet view, you can also export sales data from Acres to an editable CSV.

Here's what it looks like in action.

Final Thoughts

Crafting a broker price opinion involves more than just understanding market values—it requires a tactical approach that utilizes a mix of your regional expertise and high quality, recent sales data. Leveraging Acres can enhance your ability to deliver detailed, strategically informed BPOs quickly.