Is This a Scam????

This is the question I get more than any other, usually within about two messages of someone finding one of our listings on Facebook or Craigslist:

Is this a scam?

People cannot make our prices and our financing add up in their heads. Five acres for $149 a month, no credit check. It sounds too good to be true.

You should be skeptical. I would be. There are a lot of people running land scams online, and the honest ones and the dishonest ones look identical in a Facebook post.

So I am not going to ask you to trust me. I am going to show you exactly how to check us out yourself, using public records that cost you nothing and one phone call. If we were not real, none of the steps below would work.

Step 1: Look us up on the Better Business Bureau

Start here, because it takes about thirty seconds. Here is our BBB profile.

What you can confirm on that page without taking my word for anything:

• We are a BBB Accredited Business with an A+ rating, accredited since August 2023.
• The business started 10/23/2017 and the BBB file was opened in May 2018. We are not a page that appeared last month.
• The complaint record: one complaint in the last three years, and none closed in the last twelve months. Against 1,744 parcels sold, that is the number I would want to see if I were you.
• Who actually owns the company. That is me — David Denniston, the guy writing this.
• Our real address and phone: 3600 American Blvd W, Suite 655, Bloomington, MN 55431, (612) 230-0979.

Yes, I am in Minnesota selling land in Colorado, Arizona and New Mexico. That throws people off, so let me answer it plainly: I buy where land is cheap and plentiful, not where I happen to live. Most of what we sell is in places with far more acreage than people. Sitting in Minnesota does not stop a county clerk in Colorado from recording a deed.

Step 2: Ask what name the deed is in (do not skip this)

This is the step I most want you to read, because skipping it is the single most common reason a perfectly legitimate deal starts to feel like a fraud.

Not every parcel we sell is recorded under the name “Generation Family Properties, LLC.” That is the most common one, but it is not the only one, and there is nothing sinister about why:

• Plenty of our deals are joint ventures with partners, and those parcels are often held in the partner’s company name. One of my long-standing partners holds his through Libertas Properties LLC, so that is the name you would hear on those.
• Some are held under Centurion Financial Strategies, another company of mine, rather than under GFP itself. That is most often the case where we came to own the parcel through a tax lien rather than an ordinary purchase — the county issues a treasurer’s deed in the name of whoever held the lien.
• The BBB profile above also lists us under the alternate name Southwest Family Land.
• And a few really are recorded in my own name or my wife’s.

So if you call the county, ask about a parcel, and hear a name you were not expecting, your entirely reasonable conclusion is going to be “these people do not own this, and I nearly sent them money.”

Call or text Kristy at (720) 336-1232, or email sales@genfamland.com. You can also just use the contact form.

Step 3: Find the APN on the listing

The county does not know your parcel by its listing headline. It knows it by the APN — the assessor parcel number — and by the legal description.

Both are on every listing we publish. Scroll down any listing page to the Property Details table and you will find them. Here is a real one you can open right now:

Write down the APN and the legal description. That is everything the clerk needs.

One warning: APNs look nothing alike from county to county

There is no national format. If you are comparing parcels in different states, do not assume you have the wrong number just because it looks strange. Three real ones from our own current inventory:

Give the clerk the number exactly as it appears on the listing, punctuation included.

Step 4: Call the county and verify it

Every deed in this country gets recorded with the county, and those records are public. You do not need permission, an account, or a reason.

For the parcel above, that is the Costilla County Clerk & Recorder:

• Phone: (719) 937-7671
• Email: clerkandrecorder@costillacounty-co.gov
• Address: 400 Gasper Street, San Luis, CO 81152
• Hours: Monday through Thursday, 7:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m.

Tell them you are looking at buying a parcel and want to confirm the current record owner. Give them the APN and the legal description, plus the name we gave you in Step 2.

Buying somewhere else? Every county in the country has this office, though the title varies — it is usually the County Clerk and Recorder, the County Recorder of Deeds, or in most of Florida the Clerk of the Circuit Court. Search for the county name plus “clerk and recorder” and use the result ending in .gov. Ask us if you cannot find it and we will send you the number.

Step 5: Ask for a copy of the deed

Still not satisfied? Good. Ask the recorder for a copy of the deed, or ask us and we will send it.

The deed shows you the previous owner, the new owner, and the date it was recorded. If you want to go further, you can walk the chain of title backwards — who owned it before that, and before that.

That research is what we do on every parcel before we buy it, which is the whole reason we can guarantee clean title and transfer with a warranty deed. You are welcome to redo it yourself. Genuinely — nobody has ever regretted checking.

Why the prices actually are this low

Almost nobody asks this part, and it is the real answer to “is this a scam.” The price is not low because something is wrong with the paperwork. It is low for three fairly boring reasons.

1. Raw rural land is genuinely cheap where there is a lot of it. A five-acre parcel an hour from a small town, with no water line, no power pole and a dirt road, is not worth what a suburban lot is worth. That is not a discount. That is the market.

2. We buy in volume, and we buy problems. A good deal of what we own came from county tax sales, or from owners who stopped paying the taxes years ago and want out. We buy at a price that reflects that, clean up the title, and sell it on.

3. Owner financing changes what the sticker has to be. Because we carry the note ourselves, we are not trying to squeeze everything out of the sale price on day one. Here is exactly how our financing is built, rates included, with a worked example. No credit check, and no prepayment penalty.

The parts that are not too good to be true

If I only told you the good parts, you would be right to stay suspicious. So here is the other side, and I would rather you read it now than find it out on the drive up.

• Most of it is raw, off-grid land. No power, no water, no septic. Getting utilities to a rural parcel is a real project with a real cost.
• Access is usually a dirt road. Some of it wants decent ground clearance, and some of it is genuinely rough in winter.
• There are rules. Counties have building permits, setbacks, septic requirements and camping limits. Costilla County, for instance, limits camping on your own land to 14 days out of every three months.
• You still owe the taxes. They are small — the parcel above is $139.87 a year — but they are yours.

If you want the unvarnished version for one county, with real closed prices from 400 of our own sales, read what 400 parcels taught us about buying land in Costilla County.

So: go check

That is the whole method. Look us up on the BBB, ask us what name the deed is in, take the APN off the listing, call the county, and ask for the deed if you still want it.

I would genuinely rather you spend twenty minutes verifying us than send money to anyone — us included — on the strength of a Facebook post. Every honest land seller survives that check. Go make somebody prove it.

Cheers,
Dave