I did some research this weekend on the history of the for sale empty lot next door, and my findings make me think that they are way over priced on what they are asking($57,500).

Here’s what I found. The lot was purchased by the current owner in 2002 for $15,900. The current city assessed value is only $37,500. They are asking $20,000 more than the accessed value and more than $40,000 what they paid for it only 5 years ago.

I understand the owner wants/needs to make money on the sale of real estate, but these numbers to me seem way out of whack. Anyone care to share their opinions?

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We’ve been living in our current house for about 10 years now. And all this time we’ve had an empty lot on the south side of us. A few years ago, we caught wind that the owner was interested in selling it. It’s the same size lot as what we have which I believe is 60 x 120 (fairly small). We initially thought it would be nice to buy it and double our current lot size. There would have been a lot of pluses to extra room. Example, room to expand the house, build a garage, give the kids an actual decent size yard to play in. So we inquired about and found the owner was asking approximately $15,000 for the lot. Unfortunately, that was more money than I was willing to pay, please know that I don’t know anything about real estate, I thought it was just too expensive for it’s size. Then I thought what if I could get half for $7,500. That number was more reasonable for me and still would have increased our lot size nicely. But only buying half would take a little creativity and some to take the other half. So I talked with the neighbor on the other side. Unfortunately, she had no interest in expanding her lot and also said she couldn’t afford the $7,500 for it.

So that’s where we left it. We opted to just forgot about it and just deal with what we have. Then about a year ago, there was a sign posted from a local builder that a house was coming soon. Oh well, now where going to have close neighbors, but that was fine, at least the lot would get cleaned up (It’s been very overgrown since we moved in). Then about a month ago, someone came and took that sign away.

Now to the present. Just last week a for sale sign from a local realtor show up on the property . Just for curiosities sake I called to find out what the asking price was. Care to guess?

$57,500

Yup! That’s what they are asking for this lot. That is insane, but after asking a few people, they are not shocked at the price. So now, in hind sight, I really wish we would have extended ourself a bit more to pick up the lot.

I’m writing about this, because I consider this to be a mistake I made. I used what I thought I knew to make a decision, and I had done some research I would have found out that the price a couple of years ago was a steal and we would have benefited from it when selling our house.

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