Land Value Per Square Foot Calculator

The “I’m Going To Buy A Piece Of Land Because It’s Pretty”. Turns out half the property is a sheer cliff or wetland; you can’t use it. People fail to distinguish between gross area vs. This is the usable area. They look at the sign saying 2 acre lot, when in fact your buildable area will be radicaly smaller due to steep slopes or wetlands that don’t allow a septic system. Or maybe the county want a buffer next to the creek and you can’t put structures within X distance of water.

No worries, the calculator handles math once you plug in your parcel dimensions and usability percentages. You just enter size of your parcel and % usable space. Why use square foot? Because it’s the basic building block for comparing a big tract of land out in the country to a small piece of property in town. Forty-three hundred and sixty square feet make up one acre. The conversion provides leverage when you’re trying to analyze price per unit of area.

How to Value Land Correctly

What if someone sells you something at a price per acre? That figure could be masking inefficiencies. A five-acre farm might sound more expensive then a quarter-acre suburban lot. However, the farm may have no access to utilities and zero zoning potential, meaning the suburban lot has greater value density. To understand what you’re doing with your money, you’ve got to normalize all of it down to square foot.

Raw land doesn’t arrive primed for building, which means that adjustment factors is critical. Did it come with power? Sewer? Water? Does your drive require 1/4 mile of driveway through a forest? All of those things will directly affect development costs and the tool lets you adjust them in percentages. For example, even if two lots has equally good soil, one may have city sewer and the other requires a well and septic, which is going to impact the price.

Most people overlook that when they compare a list of properties side-by-side. Because no parcel are exactly alike, comparable sales can be tricky. One might sit in a better school district, while another might have superior road frontage. Another has a legal claim for environmental cleanup on it. Others may be located on a nicer street with better road frontage. The calculator provide fields where you can account of such details and make sure you’re adjusting those differences when you don’t merely average the raw sale price.

You want to remove all of the unique elements about comparable properties; i.e., what makes them unique, and establish a baseline rate based purely on land value. Did a comparable sell at $20 per square foot? But it was zoned inferiorly. Adjust it up before comparing it to your property. That keeps you from getting lowballed by bad data, or overpaying due to some overly-inflated comps.

The most subjective piece of information going into any valuation model is probably the % of usable land. You need to be honest with yourself about the shape of the land, easements and survey lines. Is there a significant slope (e.g., over 30%)? Unless you want to pay for retaining walls, you’re not building up there. Do you have a drainage easement running through the center of the lot? That’s right… That’s not part of your usable sq ft. Cut ten or twenty percent off the whole thing, I know it feels like punishing yourself but it reflects reality so embrace it. Otherwise you’ll blow out your budget later as contractors call attention to the blindingly-obvious things you ignored.

It’s not enough to come up with a price that you can afford. It’s about knowing how much value exists in your unique market situation. Total acreage may be more important in one region for hunting potential or agricultural tax breaks. In other regions, frontage width is more important because it affects curb appeal and driveway access. Your breakdown of the comps, adjusted comparables, usable area, gross square footage, gives you a better idea of the dollars-and-cents value breakdown: what are you paying for, and how much?

How do you stop paying for air and start paying for function? What you don’t see is as important (maybe more so) than what you do see when valuing land. You can see what’s above ground but it’s what’s beneath that determines the real value. Whether you’re buying land to build on or hold for income, basing your purchase on adjusted square footage instead of raw acres helps shield you from paying too much for undeveloped land. It simplifies an otherwise complicated math problem and guarantees each dollar spent will contribute something tangible, not merely looks.

You should of checked the soil first.