Most rural land changes hands without ever appearing on a national search. Each of these channels has almost no competition, because using it requires knowing it exists.
The big listing portals are a thin slice of what is actually for sale, and rurally they are the most expensive slice, because they are the slice that every buyer in the country is looking at simultaneously. The rest of the market runs on paper, phone calls, roadside signs and county websites that look like 2004.
None of these channels is secret. All of them are tedious, which is better than secret -- secrets get out, and tedium reliably keeps competition away for ever.
What to actually do
- The county tax-delinquent list. Published by the treasurer, usually annually, usually as a PDF. People behind on taxes on land they do not want are the most motivated sellers in the county, and you can approach them long before the land is auctioned.
- Tax deed and tax lien sales. The auction itself is a specialist game with real traps, but the list of properties heading to it is a free directory of distress.
- Sheriff's sales and foreclosure dockets, posted at the courthouse and in the legal notices of the local paper.
- Probate and estate sales. Land inherited by four siblings in three states who all want cash and none of whom want the land. Watch estate-auction companies, not realtors.
- Farm and land auction houses. Regional, long-established, and they publish catalogues weeks ahead. Attend one before you bid at one.
- Driving the roads and writing down the hand-painted signs. Still works. Still the lowest competition of anything on this list.
- The classified section of the actual local newspaper, which is often not online.
- The corkboard at the feed store, the co-op and the hardware store.
- USDA and FSA listings, HUD Homes, and the federal surplus property sales -- government sellers price to a schedule rather than to a market.
- State forestry, wildlife and transportation departments periodically sell surplus parcels, including odd strips left over from road projects.
- Timber companies divesting non-core acreage, usually in large blocks, usually quietly, and usually at a per-acre number that assumes you are buying all of it.