The Tract and the Number
In the spring of 2022 I drove out to a 142-acre tract near Gladewater, Texas. The owner had inherited it from his father in 1998 and never once walked the back half. He wanted $1,850 an acre. That is $262,700 for the whole thing. I almost passed. Then I ran the numbers on what it could become and the price stopped sounding high.
We were looking at a manufactured home park play. Gregg County had the demand and the front of the parcel touched a county road with power already at the line. The back 90 acres were raw timber with a wet weather creek cutting across them. My partner Jake looked at the aerial and said the back half was the value. He was half right.
How We Found It
We did not find this one through a broker. It came off a probate notice in the Gregg County paper. The son was tired of paying taxes on dirt he would never build on. I called him cold on a Tuesday. He was surprised anyone wanted it. That phone call cost me nothing and led to the best education I got that year.
Inherited land is the most overlooked inventory in East Texas. The people who own it often have no use for it and no idea what it is worth. They are not listing it. They are letting the county send them letters. If you read the probate notices and the tax delinquency lists every month, you will see deals nobody else is chasing.
The Lien Nobody Mentioned
Title work came back with a 2004 mineral lien that was never released. A company had drilled a test well, pulled out, and forgotten to file the release. It was small, about $11,000, but it clouded the entire tract. Our attorney said we could bond around it or make the seller clear it.
The seller did not have the paperwork and did not want to pay. I understood why. He had inherited a problem, not just a property. That was the first lesson. Inherited land carries inherited problems, and the problems are usually on paper, not in the dirt.
A Pipeline Through the Middle
Then the survey showed a 1930s pipeline easement running straight through the middle of the parcel. Forty feet wide. It was not on the deed we were shown. It took out the heart of our planned layout. We had modeled 38 manufactured home lots. The easement killed 22 of them.
I sat in my truck at the property line for a long time that day. It was a mess. It was also the moment the deal got real. A clean survey turns a guess into a plan. We did not have a clean survey until week six, and by then the clock on our option was already running.
Restructuring Instead of Walking
We did not walk away. We re-platted to 24 larger lots, moved the internal road to the south edge, and kept the easement as open green space. Fewer lots, but every one of them was buildable, and the numbers still cleared a 9 percent return after entitlement costs.
We closed with seller financing. The seller carried 75 percent of the price, about $197,000, at 6.5 percent interest only for 24 months. We put roughly $65,000 down and used the hold period to get the plat recorded before the balloon came due. That structure let us control the dirt without a bank telling us how fast to move.
The hold period was the real investment. Interest ran about $12,800 a year, so we treated the clock as a deadline, not a cost. By month fourteen we had the plat recorded and fourteen lots under contract to a local park operator. The remaining ten were enough to cover the balloon and leave us whole.
What I Do Differently Now
The point is not that easements are evil. The point is that the pro forma you build on day one is a guess until you read the deed, pull the survey, and run the title. Most people model the dirt before they model the paper. We do it the other way now. The first call we make after finding a tract is to a surveyor and a title company, not a spreadsheet.
If you are looking at raw land for a park or a storage deal, ask yourself one question. What is on the title that the seller has not mentioned yet? The answer usually decides whether you have a deal or a delay.
That Gladewater tract closed in August 2022 and the lots recorded the following spring.