Buying Land Online: Credit Card Checkout and Payments

You can buy land on this website the same way you buy shoes: pick it, click checkout, pay with a card. When I started doing that, almost nobody in land was. Here’s why I did it, and the good and bad of selling land online and on payments.

Why online checkout

Think about a $199 lot. If you want title insurance and all the fancy stuff, you’re going to pay more for that than for the land. Come on, really? So on the cheaper properties, online checkout is the way to go. Pick the lot, pay with a credit or debit card, answer a few questions, and we record the deed into your name. You can do it in the middle of the night without talking to anybody.

On the bigger-dollar properties we still do it the traditional way when it makes sense: title company, title insurance, escrow, all of it.

When I put the checkout questions together, I ask what name you want the title in, your address and contact info, how you heard about us, and whether you’re sure the title name is right. I give some ideas on how to set up a good title, because fixing it after it records is a pain.

Why payments

Look at any land site and you’ll see lots for $94 a month, $99 a month, $189 a month. People ask me how those sellers do it. Simple: offer monthly payments instead of a cash price, and you can often get two, three, four times the cash price or more. A lot of buyers don’t have the cash, but they can do $99 a month.

I like to make that easy too. Payments run through Stripe, with a front end called MoonClerk on top. What I like is that it charges the card automatically every month. You’re not sending a bill and saying “please pay, mister, please, please pay.” It just charges, and more often than not it goes through. When the last payment comes in, I get an email that it’s done, and it’s time to record the land into the buyer’s name.

The pros

• Buyers can act right away. They watch the video, they like the land, they check out. No waiting until Monday to call someone.
• Way less paperwork on cheap land. No closing costs that are bigger than the price of the lot.
• Payments open the door. People who could never pay cash can own land for less than a phone bill.
• Payments pay more. Terms deals bring in a multiple of the cash price over time.
• It scales. At our peak I was doing millions of dollars a year in land sales on credit and debit cards.

The cons

• Cards expire. When a card goes bad, the autopay stops and you have to chase the buyer for a new one.
• Some buyers stop paying. My terms say that if someone is more than 60 days late, I can keep the land and the money they’ve paid and sell it to somebody else. In reality, I call them and write letters first. Do you really not want this land? Let’s work out a deal, trade for something, whatever works.
• No title insurance on the cheap ones. The buyer is taking the land the way it is. That’s why every listing has the APN, the county and a video, so people can check it out first.
• It can stop overnight. When COVID hit, sales on cards stopped overnight. A couple months later people started buying land in the middle of nowhere, and everything sold out in short order. Some of those buyers came back wanting to resell for 10 times what they paid.
• Easy isn’t right for everyone. I learned that when I was giving land away. Make it easy, but make sure people know what they’re buying.

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