Choosing the wrong market can lead to months of wasted effort, thousands of wasted marketing dollars, and deals that won’t sell. ⚠️
As a Lite user, here are the basics you can apply manually:
Look for counties with strong sales activity over the last year. 📈
Look for counties with a high STR (sell-through-rate), which means supply cannot keep up with demand for land.
Avoid overly competitive “trendy” markets.
Favor areas with steady demand and consistent buyer activity. 👍
These steps work — but they require a lot of manual research and guesswork.
Why Users Upgrade to Land Insights Pro
Lite = manual market analysis
Pro = data-driven market selection 🚀
With the Market Research Tool (Pro only), you can quickly see:
Which counties and zip codes are hot 🔥
Which counties and zip codes are dead 🧊
Avg time to sell land in counties and ZIP codes.
Which counties and ZIP codes will be easy to price offers (homogeneous pricing)
If you want to eliminate the guesswork and start in the right market, you can upgrade to Pro inside Account Settings.
Tutorial on how to find profitable land investing markets in the US with Land Insights Pro ⬇️
Step 1 - Open Menu and Go to Market Research 📊
Open the menu at the top left of your screen. Click Market Research, then click Analyze Markets.
Step 2 - Determine Your Preferred Acreage Range 🌲
Choose the acreage range you want to analyze.
The acreage you should analyze depends on your land investing strategy.
Land Investing Flipping Strategies:
Infill Lots (Flipping small lots to home-builders) - 9.5k sqft to 1 acre
Rural Recreational Land (Most Common) - 2 to 100 acres
2 to 100 acres falls under the rural recreational land flipping strategy. Rural recreational land has a large buyer pool that can consist of residential buyers, recreational buyers, homebuilders, hunters, farmers, investors, developers, etc.
Infill lots usually have more restrictions and fewer potential uses.
In this example, we chose 2 to 100 acres because we want to flip larger acreage properties in high-demand markets.
Step 3 - Determine Heatmap Settings 🔥
By changing the heatmap data point, you can dramatically change how the map is colorized. This can be by volume, sell-through, homogeneity, pricing, etc. It's important to choose a heatmap data point that’s relevant to your market research and to use the tooltip preferences to fully understand each market you're analyzing.
As an example of the stark differences that can occur, below is a comparison of the 6 Month STR and 6 Month Sold heatmap data points.
6 Month STR
6 Month Sold
In this tutorial, we will be heatmapping based on 6mo STR, which shows the sell-through rate of land that is 2–100 acres over the last six months.
What is STR (Sell Through Rate)?
What is STR (Sell Through Rate)?
Sell Through Rate (STR) is the foundation of all market research. While there are other factors that do help with understanding demand or potential demand in a market (population density, job growth, etc.), sell through will always tell you what is happening in a market within a time frame, or even currently.
Available only on Land Insights Pro.
What is it?
Sell through rate is the ratio of sold properties to for sale properties within any given time frame. This could be Pending, 1 Month, 3 Months, 6 Months, or 12 Months.
This is a depiction of the past used in order to make a prediction of the future. If 15% of the current market has moved in the past month, rate would be considered 15% at 1 month, and therefore we would expect in one month for about 15% of the market to move.
Which STR is the best?
Many investors use multiple sell through rates to make a determination on a market. This depends on your strategy. You may want to look at a current and long-term sell through rate, or maybe only the most recent half of the year.
As you begin choosing markets and marketing, your results will impact your future choices in which STRs you're actually comfortable with and which ones you want to avoid. We don't suggest choosing a minimum sell through rate to apply to every market you choose across the entire United states, as each state is different insult the rates will vary.
What is a good STR?
Many investors like to play in markets that move between 10% and 20% each month, that isn't to say that you can't make money in a slower moving market. The same can be said for a market moving about 100% per year.
There is no silver bullet when it comes to sell through rate because each state has different factors that lead to the demand within each County in that state this could be as simple as weather or the size of the county, or as complex as population growth and job expansion.
Step 4 - Choose County or Zip Code 🗺️
Click the areas you want to analyze.
In this example, we selected County since we plan to send marketing to an entire county.
You can also analyze ZIP codes if you want to target smaller, ultra-hot areas.
Step 5 - Set Your Tooltip Preferences 🧷
The value that Tooltip Preferences has in your market selection process will be completely subjective. In general, the Land Insights team recommends that you do use a combination of active, pending, sold, & sell through rate. Available only on Land Insights Pro.
What is the Tooltip?
The Tooltip lets you view the data that matches the filters you selected. It can include any combination of data points available in the Market Research map.
Which datapoints should I use?
The data points you choose on your tooltip are going to be completely dependent on your 3 main factors: Property Type, Map View, or Exit Strategy.
1. Property Type
Whether you're looking for infill lots or Rural Rec properties, you may want to focus on different data points that matter more in each case. For example, price per acre matters much less on an infill lot than on a rural lot.
2. View
The data points you use may also change depending on the view you're using (County or ZIP). For example, we expect lower volume at the ZIP level, so speed may be less important compared to overall activity.
3. Exit Strategy
The data points you choose may also depend on the exit strategy you’re targeting—for example, flipping a property versus pursuing a value-add opportunity.
In this example, we selected Active, Pending, Sold: 3mo, Sold: 6mo, Pending STR, 3mo STR, 6mo STR, and Median Sold PPA.
This will help us see how many properties on the MLS are active, pending, and sold. The STR data will show us the level of demand for land in that market. Median Sold PPA will tell us how expensive the market is, which is useful if you want to avoid areas that are either too cheap or too expensive.
Step 6 - Choose a State to Analyze 🌎
Land Insights recommends starting your data analysis by looking at one state at a time. We do not recommend choosing the county with the highest STR rate in the US. Instead, compare data for several counties within a single state before making a decision.
To choose a state, scroll down to the data table and click the menu button to the right of the State column.
Type in the abbreviation of the state you want to analyze, then click Apply.
In this example, we are looking at South Carolina, so we typed SC.
Step 7 - Hover Mouse Over Counties
Start by hovering your mouse over the counties in the state you selected. Since our heatmap is set to track 6mo STR, the yellow counties represent the highest STR, while the purple counties represent the lowest.
In this example, we hovered over a very yellow county: Clarendon County.
According to the tooltip, Clarendon County is a hot market with high demand.
Clarendon County has 52 active listings, 9 pending/under contract, and 29 sold properties in the last six months, indicating very strong demand. A 56% 6-month STR is excellent and puts it on track for a 1-year STR over 100%.
Step 8 - Export or Save Your Market 💾
If you find a county that you think is a hot market, hover over it and right-click your mouse. You can also save the county by locating it in the data table and clicking Add.
You can either open the county in the Data Platform to export its data immediately, or add it to Saved Markets and export it later.
If you add it to Saved Markets, you can view the county in the Saved Markets section, located in the menu at the top left of your screen.
Bonus - Using The Gini Index to Find Easy Markets to Price
Bonus - Using The Gini Index to Find Easy Markets to Price
The Ingenious Way to Find Pricing Consistencies
Evaluating The Gini score could make or break your speed to marketing and pricing marketing accurately. Available only on Land Insights Pro.
What is the Gini Index?
The Gini Index measures the extent to which the distribution of sales PPA
deviates from a perfectly equal distribution. A Gini of 0 represents perfect
equality, while an index of 100 implies perfect inequality. Simply put, Gini captures how well the PPA of the dataset "hugs" the mean value in a distribution.
When analyzing Gini in a market, the lower the Gini, the more
homogeneous the pricing is in that market. Gini is only effective when looking at
smaller acreage ranges like 1 - 2 acres or 10 - 20 acres since it is using only the
sales prices in that range. Avoid using Gini on acreage ranges like 2 - 100 acres.
What is a Good Gini?
Because the genie is a scale from 0 to 100, with 0 being absolutely perfect and 100 being complete chaos━ there is no right answer. In a general sense, you're heading towards more and more consistency when you see a Gini of 50 or less.
As you approach 0, consistent pricing becomes apparent. As you approach 100━ there's almost no rhyme or reason to the pricing in the given market.
What is the best way to use Gini?
The Gini can be used for multiple reasons. One of the main reasons we leverage Gini is to identify homogeneous markets at scale, especially when using blind offers. We can do this by going to the acreage band of our choosing while including the Gini Index in our Tooltip Preferences. Another means of doing this would be to analyze all of your saved markets (that you vetted by using volume and sell through metrics) by heat mapping with the Gini. This will allow you to prioritize markets based on how easy it is to price offers.
Pro Tip: Over time, as you select and send out marketing, you may find that you're doing deals in markets with a specific range of Gini score━ or that markets with a specific Genie score or higher are giving you trouble, this is your opportunity to pivot and either split test or update your market selection process accordingly.