How to Pick a Land Investing Market: Filters That Matter

Knowing how to pick a land investing market comes down to a small number of screens you can run before you spend a dollar on mail: population density, transaction volume, days on market, and inventory depth. Ron Apke, who runs Apke Land with his brother Daniel and has been buying and subdividing rural acreage since 2020, works two to three counties outside major metros, targets counties with population density under 500, and wants land selling in under roughly 120 days.

This guide lays out that screen in sequence, then covers the two things most land content skips: how to build a mailing list that isn’t 40% junk parcels, and the post-contract diligence item that quietly kills deals in rural markets.

It also covers why the profit model has shifted. Buying cheap and selling for less cheap worked in 2020. The margin now sits in improvements — minor subdivides, added utilities — and investors who can’t see highest and best use are leaving most of the deal on the table.

From the Real Estate Pros Show

This article draws on an interview with Ron Apke of Apke Land / Land Investing Online on the Real Estate Pros Show, hosted by Scott Bursey.

Why Land Markets Are Chosen Two to Three Counties Out

Start by drawing a ring around the metro and moving outward. Apke’s rule is to stay outside the jurisdictions that make land hard to touch. “When you get into Atlanta, Georgia, there’s a lot of restrictions,” he says. “It typically turns out to be two to three counties removed, opposed to being in the middle of urban America.”

The logic is straightforward. Inside and immediately around a metro, zoning, subdivision ordinances, impact fees and review boards all add time and cost to anything you want to do with a parcel. Two to three counties out, those constraints loosen considerably, and minor subdivides become a process you can actually complete inside a project timeline instead of a multi-year entitlement fight.

The numeric version of the filter is county population density under 500 per square mile. That’s the floor for “rural enough.” But rural is not the objective — it’s one side of a tradeoff.

“There’s a balance between, let’s get rural enough where my population density is sub-500 in the county, but let’s also make sure we’re in a county where there is demand, where there are buyers out there when we do acquire the land,” Apke says.

Go too far out and you buy cheap land nobody wants. Entitlement freedom is worthless if the exit doesn’t exist. The counties that work sit in the band where you can still do something with the dirt and there’s a population close enough to want it — typically commuter-adjacent, recreational, or rural-residential areas feeding off a nearby metro’s growth.

Apke Land operates nationally across the continental US, which means the ring test gets applied market by market rather than to a single home region.

The Liquidity Screen: Days on Market, Transactions, and Inventory

Before a county earns any marketing spend, run three data checks. All three answer the same question: if I buy here, can I sell here?

• Transaction volume. There has to be a real record of land changing hands. Apke puts this first — “If I can buy land here, am I going to be able to sell it?” A county with almost no recorded vacant land sales is a county where your exit is a guess.
• Days on market under roughly 120 days. This is the single cleanest liquidity read. Land that sits for six or eight months in a county tells you the buyer pool is thin regardless of how attractive the pricing looks.
• Inventory depth. You want sell-through churning, not a stack of competing listings. As Apke puts it, you don’t want to be “competing with 100 other properties, and mine will sell when it sells.” Deep inventory means you’re the price-taker and your timeline belongs to the market.

These thresholds exist to support an operating target, not as abstract benchmarks. Apke Land’s goal is to have a property under contract to sell within 90 days of buying it. Work backwards from that and the 120-day DOM ceiling makes sense — you need the typical listing in that county to move faster than your capital can afford to sit.

That 90-day target also disciplines everything upstream. If a county’s average land listing takes five months to clear, you either accept a longer hold and the carrying cost that comes with it, or you accept that you’ll be the cheapest listing on the board to move it. Neither is a plan. Screen the county out and move to the next one.

There’s a balance between, let’s get rural enough where my population density is sub-500 in the county, but let’s also make sure we’re in a county where there is demand, where there are buyers out there when we do acquire the land.

— Ron Apke, Apke Land / Land Investing Online

Building a List That Isn’t Full of Bad Land

The data problem in land is that most property databases were built for houses, and their land fields are an afterthought. Apke ran into this directly while sending 20,000 pieces of direct mail a month in the first three years of the business.

“If I go rural Kentucky, for example, and I’m pulling a list and I’m like, I want vacant lots — I found like 40% of the lots had mobile homes on it or a structure on it,” he says. At that error rate, nearly half your mail budget is marketing to owners you can’t transact with the way you intended.

Beyond mislabelled parcels, there’s the question of what actually makes a piece of land bad. Apke names three:

• Slope. Steep ground limits buildable area and raises the cost of any improvement.
• Wetlands. Wet acreage restricts what can be built and complicates any split.
• No road frontage. A landlocked parcel has a narrow buyer pool and is difficult to subdivide meaningfully.

The filters that matter are the inverse of those problems. Apke’s criteria include 100% dry land, a minimum road frontage threshold — he uses 1,000 feet as an example — and the ability to separate wooded land from farmland, because those are different products with different buyers.

You don’t need proprietary software to apply these. You do need to verify them before mailing rather than after, using county GIS, FEMA and wetland layers, and aerial imagery. The alternative is paying to talk to sellers of land you’d never buy.

Where Land Deals Fall Apart After Contract

Soil is the main post-contract killer in rural land. Because the counties that pass the density screen rarely have city sewer or city water, a buildable parcel needs a well and a septic system — and septic feasibility depends entirely on whether the ground can absorb effluent.

That’s what a percolation test measures. A perc test digs test holes and measures how quickly water drains through the soil, determining whether the site can support a conventional septic system.

“We always get perc tests to make sure, because we’re in rural America,” Apke says. “It’s not common — maybe 5% of properties fall out of that phase — but it’s definitely something that can kill the value of land if it does not pass a percolation test.”

A 5% failure rate sounds survivable until you consider what failure costs. A parcel that can’t take a conventional septic either needs an engineered alternative system, which adds substantial cost and shrinks the buyer pool, or it isn’t a residential building lot at all. The pricing you underwrote no longer applies.

Sequence accordingly. Perc testing and septic and well feasibility belong at the front of your diligence, before survey work, before subdivision planning, before anything that costs real money. If you’re planning a minor subdivide, each resulting parcel generally needs to support its own system, which means soil failure on part of the acreage can change the entire split plan.

Build the inspection period around this. A contract with a diligence window too short to schedule and complete a perc test in a rural county is a contract that forces you to guess.

Why the Margin Moved From Flipping to Subdividing

The buy-cheap-sell-cheap model that worked in 2020 doesn’t carry the same margin now, and the reason is competition. Apke describes the first version of the business plainly: “At first it was just flipping. It was buying for cheap, selling for less cheap. There’s not much competition in this industry — the last couple of years, the business has matured quite a bit with other people joining.”

What replaced it is project-based. Instead of buying far under market and reselling at market, the model is buying at around 80% of market value, adding improvements, and selling above market. Apke Land’s current work is mostly minor subdivides — not neighborhood development, but splitting 50 acres into five 10-acre parcels, or the reverse. Adding a mobile home is another improvement he names.

The threat to margins, in his view, isn’t pricing. It’s blindness to what a parcel could become.

“I look at deals from five, six years ago and I’m like, oh my goodness, I was flipping land and I could have 4X’d my money instead of doubled my money, because I could have subdivided this so many times,” he says. “That’s where I see a lot of land investors fall off — they’re just looking for the flip or the $10,000 margin, as opposed to, how can I improve this land to increase my margin, increase my ROI?”

There’s a counterweight. Apke Land deliberately favors quick projects and avoids sinking excessive time into any single deal. The target is the improvement that adds the most value for the least elapsed time — which is usually a minor split in a county where the process is administrative rather than discretionary.

Deal Flow Comes From Consistency, Not Volume Spikes

Ask Apke which single habit keeps deal flow steady and the answer is consistent marketing — and the mechanism is as blunt as it sounds.

“If you turn off your marketing, your leads are going to get turned off as well,” he says. “And it doesn’t have to be — I mean, there’s people doing hundreds of thousands of reach-outs per month, but it doesn’t matter the volume. Consistently doing it is going to lead to a consistent lead flow, which leads to consistent deal flow.”

Note what that rules out. The problem isn’t a small budget; it’s an intermittent one. Apke Land’s acquisition marketing is direct mail at a few thousand dollars a month — modest relative to the business’s size, but running continuously against a tightly filtered list.

The conversion path behind it is short and deliberately human:

1. Lead comes in and gets an automated text.
2. A call gets scheduled, sometimes via an outbound call to book it.
3. From the scheduled call forward, it’s a salesperson on the phone or Zoom. Apke keeps automation out of this stage on purpose.

Expect 7 to 10 touch points to a definitive yes or no, with a sales cycle averaging around 10 days.

The timeframe to judge results by is longer than most marketing promises. “There’s people that try to promise things in 30 days. Could things happen in the first 30 days? Absolutely. But it’s a long game,” Apke says. “You want to be in it for the next five years.” His view is that land can replace a W-2 faster than other real estate paths — but on a 12-month horizon, not a 30-day one.

Frequently asked questions

What population density and days-on-market numbers should a land investor require before working a county?

Ron Apke targets counties with population density under 500 and wants land days on market under roughly 120 days. He also checks that the county has enough recorded land transactions to prove parcels actually sell, and that inventory isn’t so deep that his listing competes with a hundred similar properties.

Those thresholds support an operating goal of having a property under contract to sell within 90 days of buying it. If the typical listing in a county takes longer than four months to clear, your capital sits.

How close to a major metro should you buy rural land?

Two to three counties removed is the band Apke works. Closer in — he uses Atlanta as the example — you run into heavy restrictions that make subdividing and improving land slow and expensive. Further out, you lose the buyer demand you need for a timely exit.

What is a perc test and how often do land deals fail one?

A percolation test measures how fast water drains through the soil to determine whether a site can support a conventional septic system. In rural markets without city sewer or water, it is a precondition for the parcel being a buildable residential lot.

Apke estimates roughly 5% of properties fail at that stage. The failure rate is low, but the consequence is severe — a failed perc can destroy the value you underwrote, so sequence the test early in diligence.

Is flipping raw land still profitable, or do you have to subdivide now?

Straight flipping still works, but the larger margin has moved to improvement-based projects as competition has entered the space. Apke Land now buys at around 80% of market value and adds value through minor subdivides or improvements like adding a mobile home, then sells above market.

His view is that the biggest threat to a land investor’s margin is failing to see highest and best use — taking a $10,000 flip spread on a parcel that could have been split into multiple lots.

How long does it realistically take to replace a W-2 income with land investing?

Apke frames it as a 12-month horizon for meaningful progress, not 30 days. He believes land can replace a W-2 faster than other real estate avenues, but is direct that marketers promising fast results are overselling it.

His framing: treat it as a five-year business. Deals can close early, but the compounding comes from consistent marketing and deal flow over years.

The bottom line

Before you spend anything on mail, run the screen in order: locate counties two to three removed from a metro with density under 500, confirm transaction volume and days on market under roughly 120, then build your list with slope, wetland and road-frontage filters applied before the first piece goes out. A county that fails any of those checks isn’t a cheaper opportunity — it’s a slower exit.