I'm interested in your opinion folks. I am about to sign what is the biggest listing of my career. It will be for a list price of around 17 million. This involves many members of an extended family who want to offer their individual parcels as a block. They are all presently zoned residential but the county would look favorably at a rezoning request for Industrial. Here's the question. Would it be better to have a single listing agreement with all parties signing or individual listing agreements for each parcel with some mention in the stips that this was part of a larger agreement?
Also given the market and my considerable effort and expense, I plan on pushing for no less than 18 months on the listing.

So is it One for All, and All for One ?

Will individual parcels be sold even if Everyone DOES NOT Sign ?

I would recommend that you have ONE Listing and EVERYONE Signs it.

I had one LIsting once for eight (8) individual Heirs and it was a pain; but One Listing at least verifies that Everyone is on the Same Page and they all want to sell . . . . BEFORE you start spending money on Marketing.

Vermont dictates that our Listing Agreements be NO LONGER than 12 Months.

It may take you 2 months to get all the Signatures; so have a delayed Start Date !

G-man how did you arrive a this 17 million dollar number???That sounds awfully high for commercial land.

Even if you get an offer expect 6 months at least to close it.

We run each potential project through a pro-forma.So for example a developer would have to look at site teardown,environmental remediation,contingency reserve fees,broker fees,loan points,architect fees,zoning and planning fees,site prep leveling and grading and then the building would begin with shell costs.

Even if you had 50 acres that would come out to 340k an acre BEFORE any other development costs. I am just not seeing your numbers.PM me I would like to know more about the area.

I would just hate to see you dump money into a listing where the price is not realistic. I always go over with sellers a smaple developers pro-forma and explain things. Once I do this we then set a price.

If the sellers are not realistic it's a waste of time because no developer is going to take on a risky project that they can't sell off when it's finsihed building or will not cashflow.

Especially in these times equity partners to fund developers deals want fatter returns for there money on projects which means developers have to get the land for less to be able to fund the deal.

How about you get everyone in the Family to grant a Power of Attorney to one of them who can then transact business in this specific matter for the benefit of all of them.

I don't know anything about the property involved; but the simple logistics of getting everyone to Agree to accept an Offer could be a Nightmare. This is especially true if, as I'm guessing, the Sellers are scattered around the world; you don't want an otherwise good Offer to wither up and die because you can't communicate with every Seller in a timely manner.

Hopefully you'll have one individual who is trusted by all of them AND is willing to accept a POA. Then it is simply one signature on the Listing Agreement and one Signature on the P&S. A durable POA may even allow him/her to execute the Deed(s).

Maybe it would be even better to put all portions of the Offering in a Family Trust with one Trustee authorized to act for the Trust ?

if you do just one listing with all parties signing, just make sure that you have your legal description for the listing set up accurately so that all properties within the assemblage are captured.

I personally prefer to do individual listings so as to make it clearly demonstratable that all parties have signed on.

getting a raw land development deal closed right now is very, very, very tough. Make sure you have it priced extremely, extremely well or that there is some absolutely compelling reason for the deal to still be able to proceed in light of the current bad market. If it's going industrial it better be for a need and market that is in serious need for what will be built there for the banks to even begin to consider it.

I've done a ridiculous amount of land assemblages. The biggest assemblage I've done to date is 61 parcels so feel free to ask any questions!