Vacant Land Under an Acre: What the $135 Small-Lot Tier Is For

The line on our rate card that draws the most questions is the smallest one: small lot, under 1 acre, $135 per parcel, two-parcel minimum, stills only. Agents want to know why it exists, why it is cheaper than everything else, and why they cannot order just one.

All three have the same answer. A platted lot is a different product from a parcel of land, and it should be shot and priced like one.

A lot is not a small ranch

We wrote separately about what a 640-acre listing needs from the air. A land buyer is buying terrain, water, access and improvements, none of which fit in one frame, and the job is priced by how many places we have to stand to keep the aircraft in sight under 14 CFR 107.31.

A platted lot in a Sunsites or Pearce subdivision, a Benson tract or one of the Sierra Vista subdivisions is the opposite case. The land itself is a known quantity — it is the rectangle on the plat, and it fits in one frame from 150 ft. There is nothing on it to inventory and no second launch point.

What the buyer does not know is everything around the rectangle, and that is the whole job.

What six to eight stills show that a road photo cannot

The standard vacant-lot listing photo is taken from the driver's seat: a wire fence, some creosote, a mountain in the distance. It tells the buyer the lot exists. It does not answer any of the questions the Arizona Department of Real Estate tells land buyers to ask — permanent legal access, water supply, source of utility services, flooding and drainage.

From the air, in order of how often they decide a sale:

• The lot in its block. One straight-down frame with the county parcel lines composited over it, and one oblique showing the eight or ten lots around it — which are built on, which are vacant, which have a stack of pallets and a travel trailer. That is the honest version of "quiet neighbourhood".
• Access as it actually is. A plat shows a street. It does not tell you whether that street was ever graded, where the pavement stops, or whether the last quarter mile is two-track through a neighbour's gate. One frame from 300 ft looking back toward the paved road settles it.
• Where power stops. The last pole and transformer are visible from the air in a way they never are from the ground, and the distance from the lot to that pole is the first number an off-grid-curious buyer wants.
• Washes and low ground. Drainage paths that are invisible from the road are obvious from 200 ft — the vegetation line gives them away even when dry. Cochise County's Flood Control District issues floodplain permits and publishes the FEMA zone designations that drive them. A buyer who cannot see where the water goes cannot ask whether that applies to the building site.
• The view, from the height of a second storey. The Dragoons from Sunsites, the Huachucas from Hereford, the Whetstones from Benson. This is the one frame that sells.

That is five or six frames doing specific work, plus one or two for the listing hero. It is not a 20-still, 90-second-video job, so we do not charge for one. No video on this tier. There is nothing for the camera to move past.

Why there is a two-parcel minimum

Our minimum call-out on any job is $250. One lot at $135 is under it. We could have set the small-lot price at $250 — but a $250 photo invoice on a lot listed in the low tens of thousands is a hard thing to ask a seller to fund, and it should be. The marketing budget on a lot is small because the commission on a lot is small.

So the price is set by what the work costs, and the minimum is set by the drive. Driving to Sunsites, flying for 15 minutes and driving home is not a $135 job. Flying two lots four streets apart is — the second lot adds perhaps 20 minutes on site, and that is where the economics close. Two parcels on one run is the smallest unit of work we can do at that price.

How to batch lots

Your own inventory. Two or more lots in the same subdivision is the minimum met. They do not need to be adjacent. Anything inside the same platted area, or within a few minutes' drive, counts as one run.

Another agent's listing. We do not care whose sign is on the lot. If you know another agent with a lot nearby — same brokerage or not — tell us both parcel numbers. We shoot both on one trip and invoice each of you separately for $135. We will ask before we share either of your names with the other.

A developer's lots. Anyone offering six or more lots in a subdivision in Arizona needs an ADRE public report before advertising them, and the people doing that tend to hold inventory in blocks. Six lots on one run is a half-morning of work, and we quote it as such.

Give us Assessor parcel numbers rather than addresses. Many of these lots have no posted address, and the parcel number lets us pull the exact shape from the county layer before we drive out.

Where travel changes the arithmetic

The $135 is the same everywhere, but travel is by zone. Sunsites, Pearce, Cochise, Dragoon and Willcox carry no travel charge. Benson, St. David and Bowie add $50. Sierra Vista, Tombstone, Bisbee and Douglas add $125.

So two Sierra Vista lots cost $395 and two Sunsites lots cost $270. In the outer zones batching matters more — four Sierra Vista lots on one run is $665, under $170 each. Sierra Vista also sits in Fort Huachuca's Class D airspace, so lots there need an airspace authorisation before we fly; one more reason to group them.

What the buyer of a lot actually asks

The ADRE buyer's checklist for raw land is what a diligent buyer's agent will be working from. Whether there is permanent legal access. What the water supply is, and what a well would cost if there is none. Who provides power, telephone, water and sewage disposal. Whether there is a public report.

Aerial stills answer none of those questions in the legal sense — the title report, the well log and the public report do that. What they do is let a buyer two states away see enough to decide whether the questions are worth asking. A lot with a graded road, a pole at the corner and a neighbour's finished house next door gets the phone call. A lot with a wire fence and some creosote does not.

The short version

A deliberately small product for a deliberately small listing: six to eight stills that show the lot in its context, delivered MLS-ready in 24 to 48 hours, at a price a lot seller can justify. The two-parcel minimum is what makes that price possible, and the easiest way to meet it is to ask the agent down the street.

Full rate card at /pricing; the land tiers from 40 acres up are described on the real estate aerial media page.

If you have two or more lots in the same subdivision, send us the parcel numbers through the contact form and we will tell you which day we are already in that part of the valley.