7 Red Flags in a Vacant Land Purchase Agreement

A standard vacant land purchase agreement can look routine while its clauses favor the seller: an unverified acreage figure, a legal description that doesn’t match the deed, a thin title contingency, an earnest money clause silent on default, and remedies that bind only the buyer. Read every paragraph, not just the price.

What Are the 7 Red Flags to Check Before You Sign?

Vacant land deals get less scrutiny than a home purchase. There’s usually no agent walkthrough, no lender-ordered appraisal, and often no local inspector who’s ever seen the parcel, which means the contract itself is doing more of the protective work than it would on a house. These seven clauses are where that protection most often quietly disappears.

1. Does the Legal Description Actually Match the Deed and Survey?

The legal description is the paragraph that legally defines what you’re buying, and if it’s vague, incomplete, or copied wrong from an old deed, the rest of the contract is describing the wrong parcel. A survey confirms that the property lines on the ground match the description in the title commitment, catching a discrepancy before closing rather than after, according to Stoll Keenon Ogden PLLC.

A legal description built from metes and bounds, meaning a chain of compass bearings and distances from a fixed starting point, needs to be copied exactly. A dropped bearing, a transposed number, or an outdated reference to a monument that no longer exists can shift the boundary described in your contract away from the boundary the seller actually owns. See metes and bounds for how that description is built, and don’t sign a contract where the legal description is “to be provided” or attached as a placeholder exhibit.

2. Does the Contract’s Acreage Match What a Survey Will Show?

Contracts routinely list acreage with the phrase “more or less,” and that phrase is doing real legal work: it generally signals a sale of the tract as bounded, not a sale priced per acre, so minor survey variance won’t change the price or void the deal, according to FindLaw. Courts have held that these words are meant to cover ordinary survey error, not a substantial shortfall, and how much protection you get depends heavily on whether the price was tied to a per-acre figure or to the tract as a whole.

That distinction only helps you if you know which one you signed. If the contract states a flat purchase price for the whole tract with no per-acre breakdown and no clause addressing what happens if a survey shows meaningfully less land, you may have no contractual basis to renegotiate or walk away over a shortfall discovered after closing. Ask for the acreage to be tied to a current survey, not the county assessor’s number or a decades-old plat, and confirm the contract says what happens to the price if that number changes.

3. Is There a Survey Contingency, and Who Actually Pays for It?

A survey contingency gives you a window, before closing, to get a current boundary survey and back out or renegotiate if it turns up a problem the seller didn’t disclose. Lenders commonly require a survey before financing vacant land, and title companies often require one before they’ll remove the standard survey exception from a title policy, according to Stoll Keenon Ogden PLLC; without that survey, the exception stays on your policy and boundary or encroachment problems simply aren’t insured.

Two versions of this red flag show up in practice. The first is no survey contingency at all, meaning you either pay for a survey with no contractual right to act on what it finds, or you skip the survey and buy the boundary risk sight unseen. The second is a contingency with a deadline too short to actually get a rural survey scheduled and completed, which functions the same as having no contingency once the clock runs out. Confirm the contingency period is long enough for a surveyor to actually get out to a rural parcel, and that the clause says plainly what you’re entitled to do if the survey turns up an encroachment or a boundary that doesn’t match the description.

4. Is Legal Access Actually Confirmed, or Just Assumed?

A standard title insurance policy insures “legal access,” meaning a recorded right to reach the parcel from a public road, but legal access is not the same thing as usable, vehicular access, according to Stoll Keenon Ogden PLLC. A parcel can carry a paper easement that’s never been graded, is seasonally impassable, or crosses land the neighboring owner disputes, and none of that shows up if the contract doesn’t require you to verify access before closing.

Read the contract for whether it makes clean, insurable legal access an actual condition of closing, not just a line in the property description. If access runs across someone else’s land, that easement needs to be recorded, described with the same precision as the parcel itself, and confirmed to actually reach a public road, not just a neighboring tract. See legal access and easement for how these terms work, and see our guide to easements that can make or break a land deal for what else to check before you rely on one.

5. Does the Contract Include a Real Title Contingency?

A title contingency gives you a defined period to review a title commitment and object to anything that shows up, liens, undisclosed heirs, easements, or a break in the chain of ownership, before you’re bound to close. Vacant land is a disproportionate target for outright ownership fraud: scammers impersonate absentee owners of unencumbered, unmonitored parcels and try to push a sale through with a remote closing and a notary of their own choosing, according to the National Association of Realtors, which reported that real estate and rental fraud losses topped $396 million in a single year.

A missing or rushed title contingency is what lets a bad title, or a bad-faith seller, make it all the way to closing. Confirm the contract requires a title commitment from an actual title company, gives you a real window to review and object to what it finds, and lets you walk away with your earnest money back if title issues can’t be cleared. Refuse a deal built around a remote closing arranged entirely by the seller. See title commitment and due diligence period for what a proper review should cover.

6. What Happens to Your Earnest Money If the Deal Falls Apart?

Earnest money is a good-faith deposit, and on a well-drafted contract it should function the same way in both directions: the seller keeps it as compensation if you default without cause, and you get it back if the seller defaults or a contingency you’re entitled to isn’t met. In Texas’s promulgated contract form, for example, failing to deposit the full earnest money amount on time is itself treated as a buyer default, and the amount typically runs 5% to 10% of the purchase price, sized to approximate the seller’s actual damages rather than punish the buyer, according to the Real Estate Center at Texas A&M University.

The red flag is a contract that only says what happens to your money if you default, and stays silent on what happens if the seller can’t deliver clean title, misses a deadline, or backs out for a better offer. If the earnest money clause doesn’t clearly answer “who gets it, and under what conditions,” assume the answer favors whoever wrote the contract, and get that resolved before you fund the deposit, not after a dispute starts.

7. Are the Default and Penalty Clauses One-Sided?

A balanced default clause gives both sides symmetric remedies: the buyer’s deposit as the seller’s exclusive remedy for a buyer default, and a refund plus the option to sue for specific performance if the seller defaults. Courts generally test these clauses against a simple standard, whether the amount reasonably estimates the actual damages a default would cause, rather than functioning as a punishment untethered from real harm, a distinction long recognized in earnest money disputes over promulgated real estate contracts, per the Real Estate Center at Texas A&M University.

Watch for terms that break that balance: a clause letting the seller keep your deposit and separately sue you for additional damages, a unilateral right for the seller to extend the closing date without giving you the same right, or escalating per-day “delay fees” that apply only to the buyer if closing slips. None of these are automatically illegal, but a contract that imposes real cost on you for a delay while imposing nothing on the seller for the same delay is telling you something about how the rest of the deal was drafted. Push back on any remedy that isn’t mirrored for both parties, and don’t treat a one-sided clause as boilerplate just because it’s on a printed form.

Every one of these red flags is easiest to catch before you sign, not after. A purchase and sale agreement for vacant land gets far less outside scrutiny than a home purchase does, which means the burden of catching a bad legal description, an unverified acreage figure, or a one-sided default clause falls on you and whatever attorney or title company you bring into the deal. Compare any specific concern here against our guide to red flags that mean land isn’t actually buildable if access and boundary issues are pointing toward a bigger problem than the contract itself. For a broader framework on evaluating any land deal or land-buying company against a consistent standard, see our guide to comparisons.

If you’re the one holding vacant land rather than buying it, and dealing with any of these same title, access, or boundary complications from the seller’s side, AMM Land Sales makes cash offers on vacant land directly to owners in all 50 states and closes through a licensed title company; see sell land for state-specific information.