What Actually Moves Waushara County Land Prices

If you own acreage or a lot around Wild Rose, Wautoma, Redgranite, Pine River, or Poy Sippi, you have probably typed the address into an online estimator. Sometimes the number looks plausible. Sometimes it is clearly a house model trying to price a woodlot.

I'm Alex LaRoux, CEO/Broker of Empower Real Estate Inc., and I run Wisconsin Dirt. Houses and vacant land do not price the same way. This is general market information, not an appraisal.

A county median will not price your parcel

Through September 2026, the Waushara County median sale price was $306,250 year to date, up 7.5% from $285,000 a year earlier, according to the Wisconsin REALTORS Association. Closings were essentially even: 238 compared with 239. September itself was busier, but those homes took longer. Average days on market rose from 67 to 85, and inventory stood at 5.4 months.

That is a housing picture. It is useful context, and it is not a price-per-acre for your ground.

Short-term reads can also swing hard in a small county. Until WRA published official October county figures — they had not been posted as of November 13, 2026 — the REALTORS Association of Northeast Wisconsin October chart showed a median sold price of $205,000, down 33.06% from September’s $299,900. Redfin’s county page, covering the three months ending October, landed nearby, at a $209,296 median. Typical estimated values did not follow that dip down. Zillow’s Home Value Index as of October 31, 2026, put the typical Waushara County home at $269,351, up 6.1% from a year earlier.

A few closings can move a small-county median a long way. If housing medians can disagree that much in one month, you should not price land off a headline.

What buyers of this ground actually weigh

When I look at a Waushara parcel, the conversation usually comes back to a short list:

• Woods versus tillable, and how the two sit on the property.
• Road frontage, legal access, and whether a buyer can get in without a fight.
• Wetlands, low ground, and how much of the acreage is actually usable.
• Buildings, if any, and whether they help or need work.
• How the property is used — hunting, recreation, a future homesite, a lake lifestyle, or income ground.

Automated estimates are built mainly for homes. They often miss those things. As of November 12, 2026, Zillow showed 53 land and lot listings in Waushara County (22 around Wautoma, 17 around Wild Rose, 13 around Redgranite, and 15 around Pine River). Redfin showed 44 the same day. A clean county-wide median list price for land only was not published. Visible asking prices on Redfin’s county land search ranged from $13,200 for a 0.86-acre Redgranite lot to $1,319,999 for a 98-acre listing in the Berlin 54923 area that Redfin included in the county results.

That spread is the point. Your number lives in the comps and in the character of the ground, not in an average of those asking prices.

Lifestyle is part of the value

Land here is often a lifestyle as much as an asset: a place you have hunted, a quiet road, a lake weekend, a parcel you meant to leave to someone. I use a short film from Lake Napowan, near Wild Rose, to talk about that. The voiceover calls it a lifestyle, an investment, and a legacy waiting for its next chapter. You can watch it on YouTube. It is a story film, not a current listing ad.

If you are even thinking about selling in 2027, winter is a practical time to get a review on the books — not because winter is automatically the best time to sell land, but because spring is when more listings tend to show up, and you will want a clear number before then.

Get a starting review

Request a Waushara land-value review, or enter the closest service address on Empower’s free valuation page: empowerrealestateinc.com/evaluation. That tool is a starting point, and it is often less reliable on rural land than on a typical home. I will follow it with a comparable-sales review against recent land sales and current listings. No obligation.

Call or text 920-573-1478, or email alex@empsales.com.

Figures retrieved November 12–13, 2026, from the WRA September 2026 reports, RANW Waushara County Market Trends, Redfin, and Zillow, and may be revised by the source.