A listing with four dark photographs and no description is competing against nothing, and the discount has nothing to do with the land.
Two identical parcels, one with a drone video and a written description of the creek, one with three phone photographs taken in February from inside a truck. They do not sell for the same money, and the difference is not the land. It is that the second one never reached most of the people who would have wanted it.
This is the most reliably mispriced category in rural property, because good marketing is expensive relative to a cheap listing and lots of rural sellers are doing it themselves, or through an agent whose business is houses in town and who took this on as a favour.
What to actually do
- Sort by days on market, descending, and start at the bottom. Over ninety days rurally is not a red flag, it is an invitation.
- Read the listings with no photographs at all. Most are nothing. Some are an estate with a lawyer handling it who has no idea what it is worth.
- Look for winter photographs of a property you would want in summer -- bare trees, mud, grey sky. The land looks awful and photographs terribly, and that is in the price.
- Search misspellings and the unfashionable word. "Acerage". "Mobil home". "Hunting camp" rather than "retreat".
- Set alerts for price reductions rather than new listings. A reduction is a seller telling you, in public, that they were wrong about what it is worth.