The 73 Acres Near Jefferson That Almost Got Away
I almost skipped a 73 acre tract outside Jefferson, Texas last spring. The Marion County records made it look like a problem child. It had sat on the tax delinquent list for three years running. The owner of record was a California trust nobody in town had heard of. Most buyers scroll right past that combination. I almost did too.
How the deal found me
A birddog in Longview forwarded me the tax sheet on a slow Tuesday. I ran the trust name through the California secretary of state and found a trustee in Sacramento who had inherited the land from an uncle in 2019 and never once set foot on it. I sent a plain letter. Two weeks later he called. He thought the place was worth ninety five thousand dollars because Zillow showed neighboring one acre lots near the lake going for that number. He was pricing a forest like a building lot.
The numbers
We landed on thirty eight thousand dollars, all cash, about five hundred nineteen dollars an acre. He took it. He was bleeding eleven hundred a year in back taxes and just wanted the file closed. I wired the money on a Wednesday. The deed recorded the following Monday. For a tract most people would have passed on, the hardest part was convincing the seller the price was fair.
Walking the dirt
I drove out the next weekend with a county plat and a tape measure. The tract has roughly four hundred eighty feet of frontage on County Road 3125, then drops into pine and mixed hardwood on a gentle slope toward a wet weather creek. There is an old barbed wire fence line nobody has tightened in twenty years. The real surprise was a stock pond tucked behind the tree line that the trustee did not know existed. The water was clear. The dirt smelled like East Texas pine. It was quiet enough that you could hear the creek from the road.
I walked the boundary on foot because the plat did not match the fence in two spots. The northeast corner was about forty feet off from where the survey said it should be. Not a deal breaker, but it told me the last person who cared about this line was a long time ago. I noted it and moved on.
The timber alone was worth a look. A local cruiser estimated close to three hundred cords of mixed pine and hardwood across the tract. At the stumpage rates Marion County was paying that spring, a clear cut would have returned roughly two thirds of my purchase price. I was not planning to cut it, but knowing the floor was there made the downside easy to live with.
The title surprise
My title check turned up an easement granted in 1962 to a gas company that drilled a single test well and then dissolved. The well pad was long gone. The easement was never released. On paper it still ran with the land. A buyer with a lender would have flagged it immediately. I was closing without title insurance, so the risk was mine to carry. I knocked four thousand dollars off the price to cover a future quiet title action and took a signed indemnification from the seller. Cheap insurance, and it kept the deal moving.
The exit
I listed it to my recreational buyer list twelve weeks later at seventy two thousand. A buyer from Dallas closed within three weeks. He wanted the pond and the privacy, not the timber. He is building a weekend cabin out there. My net on the deal after holding costs was just under thirty thousand dollars. The pipeline easement never came up at closing because the buyer paid cash and we disclosed it in the contract up front. No surprises on either side.
What I learned
The Jefferson tract taught me that the ugliest records often hide the cleanest dirt. A tax delinquent, out of state trust with a stale easement looks like a headache on a spreadsheet. On the ground it was a quiet piece of pine with a pond and a clear creek. I now pull every Marion County tax delinquency sheet myself instead of waiting for a birddog to forward one. The best deals are the ones nobody else finished reading.
I still drive past County Road 3125 when I am in the area, just to check the fence.