Acres Founder & CEO Carter Malloy: How to Use Data to Know Your Land Value
Listen and subscribe on YouTube, Spotify, Apple Podcasts.
Knowing your neighbors helps, but knowing your neighbors’ data may help even more. Today, some of the most important forces affecting land values may have little to do with farming.
Housing developments, commercial projects, energy infrastructure and, increasingly, data centers are competing for land, particularly around growing metropolitan areas.
And figuring out where those forces are headed requires accessing something farmers and landowners haven’t always had an easy time getting: data.
That’s one reason Carter Malloy, Founder & CEO of Acres, believes information about land is becoming increasingly important to virtually everyone involved in a land transaction.
“Our customer is anybody that is involved in a land transaction,” Malloy told American Farmland Owner from his office in Fayetteville, Arkansas. “So that can be the lender, the broker, the landowner, the developer, people who build things, all of the above.”
Carter Malloy bio:
Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis – Agribusiness Industry Council board member
Signature Bank of Arkansas – Board of Advisors
AcreTrader – Founder, Former CEO
Northwest Arkansas Council – Former Executive Committee member
How Do You Understand Land Data?
The issue isn’t simply collecting data. It’s understanding what that data means. Malloy offered an example of an acre of farmland on the edge of a growing community. Maybe it is worth $5,000 or $10,000 as agricultural land.
But if that same acre becomes developable, Malloy said, the economics can change dramatically.
“If you can build houses or data centers or offices or whatever it may be on that acre, suddenly it might be worth $50,000 or $100,000,” he said.
It could be a multiple of the property’s agricultural value.
“When you’re talking about development, you’re often looking at jumps, not in percentages, but in multiples,” Malloy said. “So suddenly the land is worth 2, 3, 5, 10x what it would have been otherwise.”
That is where data becomes particularly important for farmland owners.
What Increases Farmland Value?
Zoning. Future land use. Sewer availability. Water lines. Infrastructure.
Those things can help determine whether a piece of farmland remains farmland or whether it becomes something far more valuable to someone else.
But there is another piece of the puzzle that may be even harder to see. Who is buying?
Malloy says Acres has spent years tracking limited liability companies and identifying the connections between them. A company might operate through numerous LLCs, making it difficult to see the larger picture simply by looking at property records.
“We have spent years tracking down LLCs and building pattern recognition across various entities,” Malloy said.
RELATED: Carter Malloy explained to American Farmland Owner in 2024 how his early memories on the farm shaped his career now as a land industry leader.
How Is Land Data Tracked?
The goal is to connect those individual entities to their parent companies and ultimately identify patterns of land acquisition.
That can provide a very different view of what is happening around a community.
“You have this one parent entity,” Malloy explained. “And they may have 10, 100, literally a thousand different LLCs that they’re out buying real estate with.”
Understanding those purchases can reveal what Malloy calls the “path of physical growth.” And it sometimes occurs before that growth becomes obvious to the general public.
Think about the implications for a farmland owner. If a major homebuilder has quietly acquired property next to your farm, the value proposition for your land may have changed.
What Is Homebuilder Market Intelligence?
Acres just launched its Homebuilder Market Intelligence. It allows users to compare and access data from more than 3,000 counties in more than 1,000 U.S. metro and micropolitan areas and includes information from 155 million parcel and 60 million land transactions.
“If you understand that, you know, D.R. Horton has, through a shell entity, bought land next to yours, the price of your land just changed and perhaps dramatically,” Malloy said.
That’s a pretty powerful piece of information. And it also explains why rumors around land development can be so difficult.
A farmer may hear that a company is coming. A neighbor may have heard something different. Somebody may have seen surveyors along the road.
But rumors aren’t data.
“There’s always rumors,” Malloy said. “But when you can have a confirmation that an institutional land buyer or an energy company or a data center business has bought the land next to you or is looking at the land that you’re on, that’s going to change the conversation for the parties involved in that.”
The data-center boom provides perhaps the clearest example.
What are those companies looking for?
Malloy’s answer was simple.
“Power and water. I think power is the very, very large one,” he said. “So, access to power, headroom, and availability of that power there locally.”
For landowners, knowing what a potential buyer values can be just as important as knowing what has already been purchased.
“Land is an emotional asset class,” Malloy said.
