Who Buys Vacant Land From Wholesalers: Builders, Farmers, and Land Bankers Compared

The Land Sales Mix That Reveals Who Is Buying

Ask most wholesalers who buys vacant land and the answer is vague: "investors," "builders," "whoever wants it." The Realtors Land Institute and National Association of Realtors’ most recent Land Market Survey gives a real breakdown instead. Reported 2025 land sales broke out at roughly 33% agricultural, 30% recreational, and 20% residential by category, and that mix is a direct proxy for the buyer types actually closing on land: working farmers and ranchers, hunting and recreational buyers, and homebuilders, in roughly that order of volume.

Working Farmers and Ranchers

At roughly a third of the market, agricultural buyers are the single largest category of land buyer, and they are not evaluating a parcel the way a residential buyer would. A working farmer or rancher is pricing soil quality, water rights, crop history, and proximity to their existing operation, not curb appeal or school districts. A wholesaler assigning agricultural land to this buyer type needs to know the parcel’s farming use history, not just its acreage and price.

Hunters, Recreational Buyers, and Land Bankers

Recreational buyers make up roughly 30% of the land sales mix, close behind agricultural, and this category covers hunters, off grid buyers, and land bankers who purchase raw acreage purely to hold for future appreciation rather than any immediate use. That last group, the land banker, is often the easiest recreational buyer type to sell to repeatedly, since their buy criteria is closer to price per acre and location than any specific use case a farmer or a homebuilder would care about.

The Buy and Lease Back Investor Hiding Inside the Agricultural Share

The 33% agricultural figure hides a buyer type that never shows up as its own category: the non operator landlord, an investor who buys farmland specifically to lease it back to a working farmer rather than farm it themselves. According to USDA Economic Research Service data, non operator landlords own 80% of all rented US farmland, 283 million acres, about 30% of all farmland nationally, and retired farmers make up 38% of that non operator landlord group specifically.

That last detail matters for how a wholesaler pitches this buyer: a retired farmer turned landlord is often the single best-informed buyer on a farm parcel’s actual production value, since they were likely operating land like it themselves not long ago, and they are buying for lease income and long term appreciation rather than for use.

Matching the Parcel to the Buyer Before You Market It

The practical takeaway is that "land buyer" is not one list, it is at least four separate lists with different pricing logic, different diligence needs, and different closing timelines: farmers and ranchers, recreational and land banking buyers, non operator landlord investors, and the builder channel this document’s companion pieces cover separately. Marketing a farm parcel to a recreational buyer list, or a hunting tract to a farmer list, wastes the marketing window a land deal has before a more targeted buyer finds it first.

Sorting sellers and parcels correctly before the buyer call is exactly the qualifying work VA Horizon’s in-house SDR handles on every interested seller, so the lead landing in your pipeline already comes with the parcel details that decide which buyer list it actually belongs on.

Sources

The external data in this article draws on the sources below. Figures described in the text as estimates or industry triangulations are directional and are not attributed to a single dataset.

• Realtors Land Institute, "2025 Land Market Survey"
• USDA Economic Research Service, "Farmland Ownership and Tenure"

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