Commercial Land Brokerage in the Salt Lake Valley

Week one

What you get in the first week

• Send the parcel number, the current zoning, and whether anything has been submitted to the city. You get back a written opinion with the comps behind it: what has traded nearby, what is asking now, and what the zone will actually support. Utah does not require price disclosure, so most of those trades never become public. Ours come from our own closed files.
• If a rezone is the real play, it gets priced separately, with what the change would be worth and what it would take. And where it applies you see both numbers, the sale and the ground lease, because the right answer is not always selling.

Pricing

What a parcel is worth is what it will carry

Two parcels on the same street at the same acreage sell for different numbers, and the difference is what a buyer can put on them. The zone and what it allows for setbacks and coverage, where power and sewer actually stop, and whether the access the site needs already exists.

Ground priced on what it could be rezoned for is ground priced on an assumption somebody else made. We price what is entitled today, then say separately what a zone change would be worth and what it would take, so an owner can decide whether to sell the work or sell the dirt.

Keeping the land

Ground leases

Not every parcel should be sold. A ground lease keeps the land in your name and puts a rent on it, and for an owner who does not want the tax event this year it is often the better answer.

We list ground both ways: by the acre for yard, storage, and equipment use, and as a build-to-suit where a user wants the building without owning what it sits on. The two draw different buyers and they price differently, so an owner should see both numbers before choosing.

The broker

Who runs a land listing

Jeff McComas has held a Utah real estate license since 1986 and 9 of his 23 recorded sales are land, the heaviest land concentration at the firm. When a question comes up about how a parcel on a particular road has traded before, that is the record it gets checked against.

The listing itself is staffed by what gets built. A pad in front of a center goes to whoever leases that center, industrial ground goes to the people leasing the buildings around it, and a parcel with a user already attached goes to whoever represents the user. Highest and best use decides who runs it.