The same drive time costs twenty to forty per cent less on the other side of a county line, because the line is where the tax rate and the school district change.
Land prices do not fade smoothly as you leave a city. They step. The steps are at boundaries -- county lines, school district lines, the edge of a water authority, the end of a paved road -- because those are the lines that change somebody's tax bill, their commute story, and whether their children change schools.
The useful consequence: two parcels forty minutes from the same job, the same distance from the same grocery, can differ by a third in price because one is in the county everybody has heard of and the other is not. Nothing about the land is different. What differs is how many people searched there.
This is the single highest-leverage move available to a buyer who is flexible about where, and it costs nothing but a willingness to look at a map rather than at a reputation.
What to actually do
- Draw your real constraint as a drive time, not a place. "Fifty minutes from the hospital" is a constraint. "Near Asheville" is a preference wearing a constraint's clothes.
- List every county that any part of that circle touches. There are usually more than you expected, and the ones you had not heard of are the point.
- For each one, pull the county assessor's median sale price per acre -- it is public, and most assessors publish sales data. Rank the counties. Then look at the bottom three.
- Check the tax rate separately from the price. A cheap county with a high millage can cost more to hold than an expensive one, and that only shows up in year two.