Across 720 closed land sales in the Doorify MLS in the twelve months to July 24, 2026, the median acre sold for $174,379 in Wake County, $50,510 in Franklin, $47,210 in Johnston, $40,903 in Wilson and $30,026 in Nash. Those are closed prices. Every per-acre figure you will find on a national land portal is an asking price, and on the day I checked, the two largest of them disagreed about Franklin County by $27,251 an acre.
This table is built from Doorify MLS closed-sale records for every property typed as Land in the five counties, for the twelve months ending July 24, 2026. No estimates, no asking prices, no national model.
| County | Closed land sales | Median $ / acre | Median sale price | Median lot size | Median days on market |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Wake | 228 | $174,379 | $288,250 | 1.27 acres | 83 |
| Franklin | 218 | $50,510 | $71,000 | 0.93 acres | 97 |
| Johnston | 186 | $47,210 | $150,000 | 3.01 acres | 89 |
| Wilson | 26 | $40,903 | $77,750 | 1.70 acres | 67 |
| Nash | 62 | $30,026 | $75,000 | 2.66 acres | 107 |
| All five counties | 720 | $67,687 | $140,000 | 1.61 acres | 91 |
Read the median lot-size column before you read anything else. Franklin's median closed parcel was under an acre; Johnston's was three acres. Those two counties are not selling the same product, which is exactly why Franklin's blended per-acre number lands above Johnston's while its median sale price is less than half.
Wilson's 26 sales are a thin sample. I am reporting the figure because it is the real one, but treat a 26-sale median as a direction, not a decimal.
Here is what the national sources said about Franklin County, North Carolina when I pulled them on July 25, 2026:
The 2.2x gap between LandSearch and Land.com is not a data error. It is two different statistics on two different inventory sets. LandSearch published a mean across 240 listings; Land.com published a median across a set it never sizes — but one whose 31-acre average lot tells you it is weighted toward large rural tracts, where LandSearch's mean is being lifted by small building lots priced at six figures an acre. A mean per-acre figure gets dragged upward by a handful of those lots. A median ignores them.
What is interesting is that both numbers turn out to be near-misses for something real. LandSearch's $49,341 mean sits within $1,200 of the blended closed median of $50,510 that the MLS records. Land.com's $22,090 median sits within $1,800 of the $23,878 that Franklin County tracts of one acre or more actually closed at. Each portal is accidentally describing a different half of the county. Neither tells you which half you are standing in.
The practical rule: a per-acre number is meaningless unless you know three things about it — closed or asking, mean or median, and the parcel-size range it covers. Every figure on this page states all three.
There were 803 active land listings across the five counties in the Doorify MLS as of July 25, 2026 — 715 of them typed Unimproved Land, with the remainder split between Agriculture, Farm, Ranch and a handful of oddities including one boat slip and one deeded parking space. Median active list price: $229,900. Median active parcel: 2.10 acres.
| County | Active land listings | Median active lot | Median asking $ / acre | Median closed $ / acre | Median close as % of original list |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Wake | 324 | 1.28 acres | $250,000 | $174,379 | 92.0% |
| Franklin | 186 | 1.95 acres | $51,057 | $50,510 | 91.5% |
| Johnston | 170 | 3.92 acres | $70,538 | $47,210 | 94.1% |
| Nash | 98 | 5.10 acres | $28,333 | $30,026 | 93.4% |
| Wilson | 25 | 15.00 acres | $40,000 | $40,903 | 83.3% |
The asking-versus-closing gap is not uniform, and the reason is the lot-size column: Nash's active listings are twice the size of its recent closings, which mechanically pulls its asking-per-acre figure below its closing figure. Comparing active per-acre to closed per-acre across different parcel mixes is precisely the mistake the portals make.
The clean measure of the gap is the last column — what a closed sale fetched against what the seller first asked. Across all 720 sales, the median land closing came in at 92.3% of its original list price, and 70% of sellers closed below their original ask against 9% who beat it. Franklin was the toughest of the five: 78% of its 218 sellers took less than they first asked. If you are pricing a tract in Louisburg or Franklinton, budget for that, or price so you do not have to.
Wake's $174,379 is 5.8 times Nash's $30,026. That is the headline, and it is real, but a good chunk of it is parcel size rather than geography. Restrict every county to tracts of one acre or more and the picture reorders itself:
| County, tracts of 1 acre or more | Closed sales | Median $ / acre | Rank on the blended figure |
|---|---|---|---|
| Wake | 128 | $97,341 | 1st |
| Johnston | 152 | $41,338 | 3rd |
| Nash | 47 | $23,934 | 5th |
| Franklin | 106 | $23,878 | 2nd |
| Wilson | 14 | $18,485 | 4th |
Two things fall out of that. Wake's premium over Nash shrinks from 5.8x to 4.1x once you compare acreage to acreage — Wake is still comfortably the most expensive dirt in the region, but not by the multiple the raw medians suggest. And Franklin and Nash land costs the same per acre, within $56 of each other, once you stop letting sub-acre building lots stand in for farmland. Franklin only looks more expensive because 112 of its 218 closings were parcels under an acre, closing at a $119,643 median per acre, against 106 tracts at $23,878.
The cleanest natural experiment in the whole dataset is the town of Zebulon, whose addresses straddle four county lines. Same postal town, same school-run distance, four different per-acre outcomes:
| Zebulon address, by county | Closed land sales | Median lot | Median $ / acre |
|---|---|---|---|
| Wake County | 13 | 2.42 acres | $47,461 |
| Franklin County | 28 | 3.72 acres | $44,228 |
| Johnston County | 10 | 6.82 acres | $36,826 |
| Nash County | 4 | 6.72 acres | $28,585 |
Those samples are small — four sales in Nash is four sales — but the ordering is the same one the county-level data gives, and the parcels are close enough together that a buyer can drive all four in an afternoon. The county line is doing some of the work. Parcel size is doing more of it.
Sort all 720 closed sales by size instead of by county and the per-acre number falls off a cliff. This is the single most reliable relationship in the land data, and it holds across every county in the region.
| Parcel size | Closed sales | Median $ / acre | Median sale price | Median days on market |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Under 1 acre | 273 | $178,571 | $65,000 | 81 |
| 1 to 2 acres | 114 | $69,578 | $75,000 | 81 |
| 2 to 5 acres | 141 | $55,118 | $165,000 | 100 |
| 5 to 10 acres | 46 | $31,310 | $220,000 | 152 |
| 10 to 25 acres | 103 | $21,866 | $300,000 | 86 |
| 25 acres and up | 43 | $11,765 | $740,000 | 169 |
A fifteen-fold spread from top to bottom, and no county boundary involved. What you are paying for on a sub-acre lot is not dirt — it is a recorded plat, a driveway permit, a septic permit or a sewer tap, and a utility connection, all of which cost roughly the same whether the lot is a half acre or fifty. Spread those fixed costs over 40 acres and the per-acre number collapses.
The corollary matters to sellers: if you own 30 acres and someone quotes you the county's headline per-acre figure, they are quoting you the wrong bucket by a factor of four or five.
After acreage, three site facts move the number more than anything else, and none of them appear on a portal's per-acre summary.
Frontage on a state-maintained road is worth real money because it makes access a permit rather than a project. Any driveway connecting to a state-maintained street requires a driveway permit from NCDOT before construction, issued under the department's Policy on Street and Driveway Access to North Carolina Highways. A landlocked interior tract reached by a deeded easement across a neighbour's field is a different asset with a different buyer pool and a longer marketing time — and in a market where the mean days on market for land is 144, marketing time is money.
Outside municipal sewer, a tract is only as buildable as its soil. In North Carolina that runs through an Improvement Permit issued under Article 11 of Chapter 130A of the General Statutes; the governing section is G.S. 130A-335. The soil and site evaluation behind the permit — what most buyers still call a perc test — can be done by the county health department, or privately under G.S. 130A-336.2 by a licensed soil scientist certified as an Authorized On-Site Wastewater Evaluator, a licensure track created under Chapter 89F. Two adjoining ten-acre tracts can differ by six figures on the strength of one soil map.
A tract with a public water line at the road removes a well from the buyer's budget and the buyer's risk calculation. A tract without one does not. That is not a statistic I can pull from the MLS — the field does not exist in a reliable form — so treat it as nineteen years of watching which listings close and which ones sit. Where a water line ends is often the sharpest price boundary on a rural road, and it never coincides with a county line.
The same logic drives commercial dirt, which we cover separately in investing in Zebulon commercial real estate.
Land is slower than houses and the tail is long. Across 705 closed land sales with a recorded days-on-market figure in the twelve months to July 24, 2026, the median was 91 days and the mean was 144. That 53-day spread is the signature of a market where most parcels move in three months and a meaningful minority sit for well over a year.
For context, resale houses in the same counties over the same window closed in a median 59 days in Wake, 64 in Johnston, 70 in Franklin, 66 in Nash and 67 in Wilson. New construction, which sits listed from foundation to certificate of occupancy, ran 117, 130, 123, 108 and 119 days respectively, pulling the blended residential medians up to 70, 84, 90, 85 and 83. Against the resale figures — the fair comparison, since land has no construction period — land at 91 days is the slowest product in the region. The 803 land listings active on July 25, 2026 had a median 106 days already on the board.
By county, land closed at a median 67 days in Wilson, 83 in Wake, 89 in Johnston, 97 in Franklin and 107 in Nash. And the size buckets tell you where the patience is required: tracts of 25 acres and up took a median 169 days, and five-to-ten-acre parcels 152 days, against 81 days for a sub-acre lot. If you are listing acreage in Nashville or Middlesex, plan on two seasons, not two months.
For buyers: start from the closed number for your parcel size in your county, not the county headline, and not a portal average. Then price the three site facts above before you price the acreage. Our live listing search runs off the same Doorify MLS mirror these figures came from, so you are looking at the actual inventory rather than a national aggregator's cached copy of it — and if you want the land-only cut narrowed to one county and one parcel-size band, ask us and we will pull it straight from the mirror.
For sellers, the honest position is this: there is no Zestimate for land. Zillow publishes the Zestimate for homes and does not generate one for a vacant parcel, which means nobody has already told your buyer what your property is worth. That cuts both ways — it is why the 92.3% median close-to-original-list ratio exists, and it is why a defensible number from real comparable closings is worth more on land than on any house.
Own a tract in Wake, Johnston, Franklin, Nash or Wilson County and want to know what it would actually bring? Send Robert the parcel details — road frontage, acreage, and whether you have a soil evaluation on file — and you will get a per-acre range drawn from the closed sales nearest you, not a portal average.
All MLS figures are drawn from the Insight Residential Realty mirror of the Doorify MLS, covering closed land sales in Wake, Johnston, Franklin, Nash and Wilson counties for the twelve months ending July 24, 2026, and active land listings as of July 25, 2026. Portal figures were retrieved July 25, 2026 and change without notice. Nothing here is a valuation of a specific parcel; septic, zoning and access questions should go to the county and to a licensed professional.
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