GIS Tools and Applications to Give Land Brokers a Competitive Advantage

If you have ever priced, purchased or owned a large parcel of land such as a ranch, farm, timber track or any large acreage properties, a land broker was likely involved. Land brokers are licensed to sell real estate, using the same license as a residential or commercial real estate agent, but they have chosen to specialize in selling land. Although many real estate agents may have residential customers that list properties with 10 acres, 20 acres or 30 acres in rural areas, most large acreage transactions have the expertise of a land broker behind them.

Challenges of a Land Broker

In the residential real estate market, the transactions, supply and demand are fairly straight forward. A family needs a bigger home, they find a realtor to help them find and buy a bigger home and usually use the same realtor to sell the home they’ve outgrown. However, it’s not that clear-cut for buying and selling hundreds of acres of recreational land, farmland or timber tracts. If you have a 160-acre parcel of land – some of it used as recreational land, hunting land, agricultural land and with a 60-acre lake on the property, there are many more components that go into selling that land, and fewer buyers than a simpler residential property parcel. You would want to use a land broker – one that understands your property, your type of land and has experience marketing and selling similar properties.

Land brokers have different challenges than your typical real estate agent because of less activity in the specialty area of farms, timber tracts, large acres of hunting land, recreation properties and other high acreage properties. How do they identify property owners with large acreage who would consider selling? How do they keep in touch with owners of large acreage properties to get their business when they’ve decided to list the property? How do they reach out to a potential market of buyers when they have a listing? How do they show potential buyers properties that span hundreds of acres? In this post we’ll discuss how GIS technology and ReportAll’s national parcel database helps land brokers to research and show properties with large acreage.

GIS Technology Shows Listings to Buyers: Property Line Layer on Google Earth

One of the challenges of a land broker is showing the property. Potential buyers of farm, timber, recreation or development acreage expect to “see” potential land purchases from their computer before spending time on-site. Using PARLAY, our parcel data layer for Google Earth, land brokers can show potential buyers property lines, parcel boundaries and real estate parcel attributes for over 148.5 million properties in the US, or close to 98% of property parcels in the United States. Try PARLAY 2.0 for free for 14 days. Regardless of the potential land use – timbering, farming, development or even right-of-way – seeing the tract in relation to the natural topography and neighboring properties is invaluable.

Map App for Viewing Property Lines On Location

Once a potential buyer has researched the property from the desktop, it’s time for the land broker to bring them to the site, likely get on quads or ATVs and check out the land. How does a land broker give a tour of a property that spans hundreds of acres and make sure to stay within the property lines? Using LandGlide®, our online property lines app, the GPS on your phone works with GIS technology and our regularly updated national parcel database to easily illustrate your location in relation to the property lines or parcel boundaries. Using LandGlide will ensure land brokers are staying on the right land while they give potential buyers a tour of the property line as well as bring up property information including owner’s name and mailing address of the adjacent properties. Ever wondered who your neighbors are before buying a property? LandGlide delivers that type of parcel data on-site.

For more information about how our map app, online maps, property lines and national parcel database helps land brokers and other professionals visit our solutions page on the ReportAll website or search by industry on the website’s industries page.