Our greatest successes are when we lose.

Now I know the title of this blog makes little sense, but what I’m referring to is the fact that it is our responsibility to protect our buyers and make sure that they don’t buy a poor piece of property. In particular we are concerned when purchasing cropland for investment purposes. It’s pretty easy to look at the aerials, read the historical crop insurance record, and even view the land and be fooled by a piece of cropland.


So how do we protect our buyers from making that type of a mistake? Well let me give you a couple of examples.

Example one was a nice piece of bottom ground with good soils that lay very level, had a good track and had a good track record of productivity from crop insurance reports. But as it turns out had gone from being a good piece of land to a bad one because of frequent flooding. Land upstream that used to be pasture land had recently been turned into cropland and as a result the grass that used to filter rainwater and flow slowly into the creek now was channeled to drain off the cropland quickly. As a result the stream through the property which used to flood infrequently now flooded regularly making it a far less attractive piece of ground.

Example two was of a property that was approximately 40% but that looked as if another 40% could be turned from pasture back into cropland. In fact at one point in the past it had been cropland. But instead of being an attractive piece of ground it was determined that even though the soils were good they were too thin and the rock layer was less than two feet beneath the surface so that any erosion at all would make the land worthless except for pasture.

So how were we able to keep our clients from purchasing these properties and making a mistake? It’s because part of our process is to make sure either before the offer is made, or after using a contingency that we have a local farmer agree to rent the property at a fair price. If we can’t find a local renter then the contract is cancelled.

In both of the examples mentioned above it would have been very difficult for someone unfamiliar with the area to know about the problems of these properties. But of course the local farmers know all about these issues and we use them to filter any cropland properties to avoid these kinds of mistakes. So we don’t recommend a buyer purchasing any property where we haven’t already identified a local renter, or we make our contracts contingent on us finding a renter who will give his blessing to the property.

While we get a big kick out of making a sale, we get a bigger kick out of knowing that our clients can rely on us to help them avoid making a mistake. And in both cases we were able to help those same clients find other properties that are more than satisfactory for them. Those clients also referred other buyers to us so in fact “losing” a couple of sales actually led to us making several more as a result.

Email Info@RuralKC.com


Phone 913-837-4665


If you want live updates or want to know when we come across a particularly hot property you can follow us on twitter. http://twitter.com/#search?q=ruralkc