https://www.lbaileylands.com/about-us

I keep a pretty good pulse on the local land market and they have been sending offers at ridiculous prices. A guy I know got an offer letter for $60,000 for a little under 2 acres and this land is in the middle of the 100 year flood plain.

for anybody wondering he will never sell

I'm a professional land buyer. Any ties to DFW?

me or Lauren bailey?


Lauren Baily is out of Missouri, my job is on the gulf coast

I get crap in the mail pretty much every week from skumbags trying to scam people out of their land.

They usually offer about 10% to 20% of what it is worth, and congratulate themselves for making such a great offer, and for being a "family owned" company.

It just pisses me off that people like that prey on elderly widows who may not know any better and might actually find some clueless person to sell for those ridiculous prices.

I get calls from these type of folks about my office all the time. I usually ask them if they'd like to sell me their house and pay me rent to stay there.

Normally these are a scam on low balling the elderly


There's no way anyone should want to spend $60,000 to own land here

Fishin Texas Aggie 05 said:

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Normally these are a scam on low balling the elderly


There's no way anyone should want to spend $60,000 to own land here

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You might be surprised. That's about the going rate for two acre tracts 40 miles out of Houston in rural areas with fm road frontage. If you can find it for that. The companies with owner financing are getting more. This is in an area where farmland in 100 acre tracts was 1,000 per acre just 20 years ago.

Could they be acting as a buyers agent for the solar panel companies that are putting in the big facilities in the area? They might need that 2 ac to reach a substation or something.

This is on the south side of Victoria with no exciting features nearby. Stuff this small has been going for about 15-18 k per acre. But land in Victoria has definitely been seeing an major uptick in value over the past year.

As far as solar farms, there's already a solar farm getting planned about 8 miles away from this as the crow flies

Is it near other infrastructure of any kind? Just thinking outside the box, but if it's in floodplain, someone may want it for some kind of project. Maybe a pipeline planned for the area?

Are they installing the solar panels on large acreage? None have been built yet on the North side of Houston that I'm aware of but they have leased multiple tracts for years to do feasibility studies. Must be government grant money funding the leases.

I know of a few people that got letters from this company and typically the offers were very high. I just assumed it to be some kind of scam

Fishin Texas Aggie 05 said:

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https://www.lbaileylands.com/about-us

I keep a pretty good pulse on the local land market and they have been sending offers at ridiculous prices. A guy I know got an offer letter for $60,000 for a little under 2 acres and this land is in the middle of the 100 year flood plain.

for anybody wondering he will never sell

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Read the find print. We get those offers for our farm land in the Brazos bottom. The. Numbers have been outrageous at times. The fine print often states that the offer is void if the property is in a flood plain, doesn't have road access and have any development restrictions. So none of our properties actually qualify even if we wanted to sell.

They don't research these properties, it is a volume game.

Yes, off the top of my head I know of 4,000 and 1,200 ac farms in Wharton County. There's also a 75 ac one that was built as a test run, and others are going in around the area. I got a call on doing some work to prepare a 3,000 ac block for one this spring.

Therein lies the scam

I was sent an offer. I later asked via email if they were still interested to 'check it out'. Within seconds, I got a link to "communitylands.com". They may be fishing for potential sellers and buyers by sending out offers that aren't legit. If you respond, then to them it means you may be a potential seller, or buyer so then you are sent the communitylands link. Then they act as an agent to close deals if you sell or buy using the communitylands site. I have doubts they buy land directly. The communitylands.com site has the same look and feel as the Bailey site, and they are both located in NY. This is all speculation on my part, I don't know.

SunrayAg: We have land in Navrro Co. and get such letters twice a month, 1/3 to 1/2 what the land we pay tax on is valued at!

Get those low-ball offers a lot of course, but the Bailey Lands site out of NY often offers fair value, sometimes more. It's more suspicious than the people low-balling.

If I wanted to sell land, I wouldn't start with a random letter or phone call.

Just sayin'

dolch said:

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If I wanted to sell land, I wouldn't start with a random letter or phone call.

Just sayin'

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You should if its a neighbor.

Aside from those spam texts, it's really amusing when these companies send out touchy-feely mail which look like it is handwritten but actually just printed. Example:

"Hi, so and so, we really want to live in Cedar Park. If you are thinking of selling, please remember us. We'd love to raise a family there."

Get a few calls a month for my dad wanting to buy his place or texts/calls asking if I can put them in touch with my dad.

SunrayAg said:

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It just pisses me off that people like that prey on elderly widows who may not know any better and might actually find some clueless person to sell for those ridiculous prices.

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The flip side of that is I know of a widow that is selling her property that she married into and she thinks she's sitting on gold mine. Anyone that does any research on the house/property etc wouldn't touch it.

I've seen a lot of, "if my neighbors place is worth 10, mine is worth 20", sort of thing. Sort of works that way with deer leases too.

If you get a random offer that's 2 to 5 times the county appraisal and and a person isn't interested in keeping their property, might as well spend a few casual minutes looking into it even though it's prob bogus, never know 100%.

Did you ever end up working with them? I sold a property to them last year and they did purchase it directly, for about appraised value. They turn around and sell the properties on Community Lands with owner financing and end up making even more than their asking price on the site. Ultimately, both companies are owned by the same people who also own a real estate development firm out of NY.

giga said:

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I was sent an offer. I later asked via email if they were still interested to 'check it out'. Within seconds, I got a link to "communitylands.com". They may be fishing for potential sellers and buyers by sending out offers that aren't legit. If you respond, then to them it means you may be a potential seller, or buyer so then you are sent the communitylands link. Then they act as an agent to close deals if you sell or buy using the communitylands site. I have doubts they buy land directly. The communitylands.com site has the same look and feel as the Bailey site, and they are both located in NY. This is all speculation on my part, I don't know.

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Lauren Bailey Lands and Community Lands have the same address in NY and are owned by the same individual. Lauren Bailey Lands seems to be the acquisition side, and Community Lands sells the land.

They have an IT team with computer algorithms that download all the bulk county tax data and filter for certain categories of possibly undervalued properties with certain characteristics and possibly even match the listed owner up against other gathered personal data. That then goes into an algorithm that targets the best potential flips or investments and automatically generates letters from a bunch of small front subsidiaries. The actual operation is possibly quite big, and maybe international.

We get offers for our 1 acre "lot" all the time, but it is a 30' x 1600 foot driveway, and valued low because it is limited use and can't be developed.