Forest City Build

How to find the right land to build your dream home

Justin Carlson -

Hunting for land can be tiresome. For some, it might be quick and painless, but for others, if you have a specific vision for your home, you can easily spend weeks or months scouring property websites for hours every night.

It's not only that looking through every single listing is very time consuming but it doesn't help when all the most popular websites such as zillow, landwatch, realtor, landandfarm, and others all seem to be lacking some key features you'd think would all be no brainers by now. Millions of property searches happen every day and this will be the case for the foreseeable future. So why don't they have these features? And is there any way to make searching easier?

Well, I can't tell you why they don't have these obvious features, but I do have a solution to help aid you in your search. Read on.

What are some of the obvious features these sites are missing?

Note: These missing features aren't exclusive to land searching. Some also are a pain point while house hunting too.

#1 - Adding Notes

In my opinion, the most obvious is a simple "Add Notes" feature. After spending 5, 10, 15 minutes looking at a single property, analyzing the photos, shape of the land, boundaries, neighborhood, checking it's location to shopping, jobs, schools, entertainment, etc. I'd like to simply note down my findings right there on the listing page. This way, if and when I come back to it, I can save myself all that time and avoid redoing some of the research.

#2 - Hide Listings

We should be able to ignore listings we outright hate or have ruled out. Checking an area every day for property and having to sort through the ones you already analyzed from the ones you haven't gotten to yet adds a lot of unneeded time to your search. Not to mention, a lot of frustration. There will be properties you reanalyze after a week because you forgot what it looked like after seeing a few hundred other listings. The note feature could also help with this pain point, but being able to have ignored listings not even show in the results and get in the way would be a time saver.

#3 - Searching nearby places

The ability to quickly search nearby places and travel times to the property you are viewing. Zillow does offer this feature and kudos to them. I find it extremely handy but it still has some limitations. First, they limit you to two places at a time. You can remove them and add more, but this again, is just wasting your time.

#4 - Plotting custom places on the map

This feature is an enhancement to the previous. Having the ability to plot custom markers on the search map. Such as grocery, hardware, schools, jobs, friends and family, or whatever is most important to you. Imagine being able to look at the map of listings, and quickly just rule a bunch out because they are out of your preferred driving range for your most common trips. Then pair this with the hide listing button and you can literally rule out hundreds of listings in minutes.

#5 - Improperly marked locations

Now this problem is none of the website's fault and the blame lies on the realtor or seller who created the listing. But having a property for sale that the buyer can't even find on a map is a huge problem. This is much more common with land listings but I have encountered this while house hunting too. A lot of land listings don't have an official address yet. The simple solution is a latitude / longitude setting, or let the listing creator just click specifically where it is on the map.

Now, I haven't created listings on every site personally, so I don't know for sure if they all already support this feature and the problem just lies with realtors / sellers being lazy while creating the listing. But how do you expect someone to get interested in your property or house if they can't even figure out where it is?

As promised, a solution to these headaches

My wife and I have spent months searching for the right land on and off for over a year. These pain points got to us so I decided to write my own browser addon to enhance these websites myself and bring these no brainer features to fruition.

So what does it do exactly?

Well, as you probably guessed, everything I just complained about.

To summarize:

  • Works with zillow, landwatch, landandfarm, and realtor (upon popular demand, I'll add other sites)
  • You can add notes to any listing
  • Hide listings
  • A very cool tagging feature (secret bonus feature)
  • A custom map that lets you plot places of interest and see how far your listing is from all of them quickly
  • The ability to correct a listings location (if you can even find it)
  • A view all saved feature that shows you all your favorites from all supported sites

Is it free?

YES! Mostly....Almost all of the features listed are free except one. Unfortunately, google maps charges money for nearby place search and travel times. So, there is a Pro account you can subscribe to so you can have that feature. You can unsubscribe at any time once you find your property and no longer need this tool.

  • Weather
  • DEmographics / Population / Race
  • flood zone
  • Crime
  • ProCon Score - Alg that gives a score based travel times / custom tags / crime? / weather?
  • Where to find land
  • Promote our custom tool - subscribers
  • How to find parcel lines (affiliate - https://www.huntstand.com/affiliate-program/)
  • - acrevalue
  • Common questions