Key Takeaways

• The best available large-sample research on nearby vacant and agricultural land found land values went UP, not down, near utility-scale solar — a 2025 PNAS study by Virginia Tech researchers (Hu, Chen, Liu, Zhang, He, Bosch), analyzing 68,000 agricultural transactions and 3,699 solar sites across 40 states from 1993–2020, found agricultural/vacant land within 2 miles of a solar site rose in value by about 19.4% on average, an effect the authors attribute to buyers pricing in the land's own future solar-lease potential — not a proximity discount
• Residential home value studies show small, inconsistent, fading effects — not vacant-land effects. Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory's six-state solar study (Elmallah, Hoen, Fujita, Robson, Brunner, 2023) found a 1.5% average price reduction for homes within 0.5 miles of a solar project versus 2–4 miles away, with no statistically significant effect in three of the six states studied; LBNL's 34-state wind study (Brunner, Hoen, Rand, Schwegman, 2023) found an 11% dip for homes within 1 mile right after a project is announced, fading to a statistically insignificant ~2% by nine-plus years later
• A separate 2024 PNAS study of 300+ million U.S. home sales (Guo, Wenz, Auffhammer) found the average wind-turbine-viewshed effect on home prices was just 1.12%, indistinguishable from zero beyond 8 kilometers, and no longer detectable for turbines built after 2017 — the honest state of the evidence is that a neighboring project's effect on your unencumbered land is small, uneven across states and land uses, largely unstudied for vacant/recreational parcels specifically, and often overstated by sellers who assume a home-value study applies directly to raw land

Does a Neighboring Solar or Wind Farm Lower the Value of My Land?

The honest answer is: probably not as much as you fear, and the research doesn't clearly say it lowers land value at all. The handful of large, peer-reviewed studies that have looked at this measure effects on nearby homes, not vacant or recreational land, and even those home-value effects are small, fade with distance and time, and don't show up in every state studied. The one large study that specifically tracked agricultural and vacant land near solar sites — a 2025 PNAS paper out of Virginia Tech — actually found land values increased near solar projects, because buyers priced in the land's own future leasing potential. That doesn't mean your marketability is unaffected; it means the effect is narrower, more buyer-specific, and less certain than "my land is worth less now" assumes.

This guide separates what the research actually measured from what sellers commonly worry about. It covers what the studies found (and didn't find) about solar and wind proximity, why vacant land and homes respond differently, how different buyer types — recreational, row-crop, homesite, timber — react differently to a project next door, what you're required to disclose, and what you can realistically do about marketability if you decide to sell. This is the mirror image of two other situations we cover: if the lease is on your own parcel, see selling land with a wind or solar lease or selling land with a solar development option agreement — those posts are about a parcel that itself carries the income-producing agreement. This post is about the opposite situation: your parcel has no lease, no easement, and no income from the project at all — the project is entirely on someone else's land, and you're trying to figure out what that means for a buyer looking at yours.

What Does the Research Actually Say About Land Near a Solar or Wind Project?

The research is more mixed, more state-specific, and more favorable to sellers than the "my land is now worthless" fear suggests — and almost none of it studies vacant land the way you'd expect. Four things are true at once: the studies are large and credible, the effects they find are usually small, the effects are concentrated in specific circumstances (certain states, certain distances, certain project types), and the land-specific research (as opposed to home-specific research) points toward higher values near solar, not lower.

Here's what the major studies found, broken out by project type, so you can see exactly where the "my land next door is devalued" narrative comes from and where it doesn't hold up.

Solar: the home-price studies

The most-cited large-sample study is Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory's 2023 paper "Shedding Light on Large-Scale Solar Impacts" (Elmallah, Hoen, Fujita, Robson, and Brunner), published in Energy Policy. The researchers analyzed over 1,500 large-scale solar projects and 1.8 million home transactions across six states — California, Connecticut, Massachusetts, Minnesota, New Jersey, and North Carolina, which together account for more than half of installed large-scale solar capacity in the U.S. On average, homes within 0.5 miles of a project sold for about 1.5% less than homes 2–4 miles away, but that average hides real variation: Minnesota showed roughly a 4% reduction, North Carolina about 5.8%, New Jersey about 5.6% — while California, Connecticut, and Massachusetts showed no statistically significant effect at all. The negative effects were concentrated among projects on previously agricultural land, near rural homes, and among the largest projects, and weren't measurable beyond about a mile.

Solar: the vacant and agricultural land study

This is the study that matters most for your situation, because it's the one that actually looked at land like yours instead of homes. A 2025 paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, led by Virginia Tech researchers Chenyang Hu, Zhenshan Chen, Pengfei Liu, Wei Zhang, Xi He, and Darrell Bosch, examined 8.8 million residential transactions and 68,000 agricultural land transactions near 3,699 solar sites across 40 states, from 1993 to 2020. The headline finding for land like yours: agricultural and vacant land within 2 miles of a solar site increased in value by about 19.4% on average, an effect that fades and becomes statistically insignificant beyond 2 miles. The authors explain the mechanism plainly — nearby land becomes more attractive to buyers because it might itself become a future solar lease site as projects expand, so the demand is about the land's own optionality, not a proximity discount. The same study found residential home values fell about 4.8% within 3 miles, which the authors attribute to a psychological stigma effect rather than any physical or measurable disamenity — and notably, homes on large lots (over 5 acres) saw almost no net effect at all, because the land-value gain offset the home-value stigma. Read plainly: the one large study of vacant/agricultural land specifically found the opposite of "devalued." Whether that applies to your parcel depends heavily on whether buyers in your area actually perceive solar-lease potential on land near an existing project — something a national average can't tell you about one county.

Wind: proximity, visibility, and time

Wind is a visibility problem more than a footprint problem, and the research treats it that way. LBNL's 2023 paper "Commercial Wind Turbines and Residential Home Values" (Brunner, Hoen, Rand, and Schwegman), also in Energy Policy, analyzed home transactions across 34 states tied to 428 wind projects built between 2005 and 2020. It found homes within 1 mile of a turbine saw an 11% decline in the period right after a project was announced, compared with homes 3–5 miles away — but that effect fades over time: by nine or more years after announcement (roughly five years after the project starts operating), the effect shrinks to about 2% and is no longer statistically significant. Homes 1–2 miles out saw a much smaller effect, and homes beyond 2 miles saw none. Critically, the effect was driven almost entirely by projects in urban counties (population over 250,000) — the kind of proximity effect rural land, where most of our sellers' parcels sit, may not experience the same way.

A separate, even larger 2024 PNAS study — "The Visual Effect of Wind Turbines on Property Values Is Small and Diminishing in Space and Time" by Wei Guo, Leonie Wenz, and Maximilian Auffhammer — analyzed more than 300 million U.S. home sales and roughly 60,000–68,000 turbines from 1997 to 2020. The average effect for a home with a turbine in its viewshed was just 1.12%, running as high as 8% within 1.5 kilometers (confidence range 3–13%) but statistically indistinguishable from zero beyond 8 kilometers, peaking around year three after installation, and fading to nothing for turbines installed after 2017. Neither of these wind studies analyzed vacant or agricultural land specifically — both are residential-home studies, same as the solar literature.

A UK data point on solar and glare

A 2023 Land Economics paper by David Maddison, Reece Ogier, and Allan Beltrán studied 204,315 property transactions within 1,000 meters of 898 operational solar farms in England and Wales. It found a statistically significant 5.4% price reduction for homes within 750 meters south of large solar farms (over 5 MW) — a directional finding tied specifically to glare, since south-facing panels can't produce glare toward homes to their north. Beyond 750 meters, or for smaller facilities, the effect disappeared entirely. It's a useful data point for how glare specifically (rather than solar proximity in general) behaves, but it's a residential, UK study — not a U.S. vacant-land study, and we're not aware of a comparable U.S. glare-specific analysis of vacant land.

Where the Texas A&M Real Estate Research Center lands

The Texas Real Estate Research Center at Texas A&M summarized the practical takeaway well in a 2025 blog post by Lynn D. Krebs: a 2023 Real Property Analytics study of six utility-scale solar projects in Texas "found no evidence of negative market impacts for nearby residential properties" within three miles, while a Texas A&M AgriLife report found wind turbines carry a visibility radius of roughly 8.7 miles and that visibility, not raw distance, drives most of the effect on nearby properties. The Center also flags — without providing exact percentages — that impacts likely differ by land classification: cropland, homestead/residential, and recreational property may all respond differently, which is exactly the honest, unresolved territory your parcel sits in.

Why Isn't There Better Research on Vacant and Recreational Land Specifically?

Because vacant and recreational land trades far less often, in far smaller, harder-to-standardize transactions, than homes do — so researchers who need a large enough sample to run credible statistics default to residential home sales, which are common, well-documented, and easy to compare parcel-to-parcel. A rural hunting tract, a raw building lot, and a row-crop parcel are not interchangeable the way single-family homes in a similar ZIP code are, and county-level land sales are comparatively rare and thin, which makes the kind of large-sample hedonic analysis LBNL and PNAS ran on homes much harder to replicate for vacant land at scale.

The one exception — the 2025 PNAS agricultural-land study — only had a reliable enough sample because it specifically pulled agricultural land transactions, which are more numerous and more standardized (by acreage, soil class, and use) than vacant recreational or timber land. There is no comparably large published study we're aware of that isolates hunting land, raw recreational acreage, or unimproved homesites near wind or solar projects. That's the honest gap: the vacant-land evidence that exists (agricultural, in one national study) points toward higher nearby values, not lower — and for recreational, timber, and unimproved homesite land specifically, we simply don't have a comparable large-sample study either way. Anyone who tells you a specific percentage discount applies to your hunting tract or your 10-acre homesite next to a solar array is going beyond what the published research supports.

Why Does a Wind Farm or Solar Array Next Door Worry Buyers Even Without a Confirmed Discount?

Because the worry is about marketability and buyer pool, not necessarily about a provable price discount — and those are two different problems. Even where the research shows a small or nonexistent effect on sale price, a retail buyer touring your land in person doesn't have a PNAS paper in hand. They have a viewshed, a construction-traffic memory if the project was recently built, and an assumption. Four specific concerns tend to drive buyer hesitation regardless of what the underlying data shows:

• Viewshed and turbine sightlines. Wind turbines are large, tall, and visible for miles — the Texas A&M AgriLife visibility radius figure of roughly 8.7 miles illustrates how far the sight of a project can reach even when the measurable price effect (per the PNAS and LBNL studies above) is confined to a much tighter 1–2 mile band, or effectively zero beyond it.
• Glare, specifically for solar. The UK Land Economics study found a real, directional glare-linked effect on homes within 750 meters south of a large array — a narrow, physical, distance-limited concern, not a blanket "solar nearby = devalued" rule.
• Construction-phase disruption. Heavy equipment, temporary access roads, and truck traffic during a project's build-out (typically one to three years, per the phases described in our companion posts on leases and options) can be the most visible, most recent impression a buyer has — even though it's temporary and the research shows effects fade once a project is operating.
• Assumption transfer. Many buyers simply assume "wind/solar nearby = bad for resale" because that's the cultural narrative, whether or not the state-level, project-type-specific research supports it for their exact situation. That assumption itself can slow a sale even when the underlying data wouldn't justify a discount.

The practical upshot: your marketing problem is often bigger than your value problem. The research suggests your land's worth may be affected less than you think (or, per the vacant-land-specific PNAS finding, potentially not reduced at all) — but the pool of buyers willing to act without hesitation can still shrink, because buyers respond to what they see and assume, not to a study.

How Do Different Buyer Types React to a Neighboring Solar or Wind Project?

The buyer pool for your land isn't monolithic, and a project next door affects each buyer type differently — which is exactly why "my land is devalued" is the wrong frame. The better question is which buyers still want your parcel and how to reach them.

Buyer type	What they care about most	Does a neighboring project matter?	Marketing move that works
Recreational / hunting	Wildlife habitat, seclusion, hunting quality, sound and visual "wildness"	Yes, often the most sensitive — turbines and cleared solar acreage can disrupt the seclusion feel even without a proven price effect, especially with wind	Emphasize tree cover, terrain, and any screening between the parcel and the project; highlight the game/habitat features that are unchanged
Row-crop / production agriculture	Soil class, drainage, tillable acres, access for equipment	Usually minimal — a working farmer cares about what the dirt does, not the view, and per the PNAS study, nearby land can carry a lease-optionality premium rather than a discount	Lead with soil data, yield history, and the possibility your own parcel could someday be approached for a lease or easement
Homesite / build-your-own	Viewshed from the future house site, privacy, quiet	Most sensitive to visibility and glare specifically — this buyer is the closest match to the "homeowner" studied in the LBNL/PNAS residential literature	Identify a homesite location on the parcel with natural screening (tree line, elevation change) that limits sightlines to the project
Timber	Stand quality, merchantable volume, access for harvest equipment	Minimal — timber value is driven by the trees and the haul road, not the neighboring viewshed	Lead with a cruise/inventory summary and access; the project next door is rarely relevant to a timber buyer's math
Direct cash buyer (e.g., Jerez Land)	Marketability, carrying cost, resale pool, title	Factored into underwriting on a parcel-specific basis, not assumed as an automatic discount	No staging needed — a direct buyer evaluates the actual parcel and project, not a genericized fear

The pattern: the buyers most rattled by a neighboring wind or solar project are usually the ones buying for a view or a feeling of seclusion — homesite and recreational buyers. Buyers who value land for what it produces — crops, timber — are largely indifferent to a project on someone else's parcel, and per the PNAS agricultural-land finding, may even see upside from proximity to future lease demand.

What Are Your Realistic Options If a Project Went Up Next Door?

You have four practical paths, and none of them require accepting a made-up discount as fact.

Option 1: List it and market to the buyer type least affected. If your land is agricultural or timber, the research above suggests the neighboring project is close to irrelevant to that buyer's underwriting — sometimes even a plus. Lead your listing with production data, not apologies about the view.

Option 2: Time the listing around the construction window. If the project next door is still under construction, the temporary disruption (equipment, traffic, noise) is doing more damage to buyer perception right now than the finished project will once it's operating — both the LBNL wind study and the PNAS viewshed study found effects that fade once a project is complete and running. Waiting until construction wraps, if you can afford to hold, can meaningfully change what a prospective buyer sees on a site visit.

Option 3: Screen and disclose, don't hide. If a solar array or turbine row is visible from part of the parcel, note where it is and isn't visible from, and be upfront about it — see the disclosure section below. A buyer who feels ambushed on a site visit reacts worse than one who read about it in the listing.

Option 4: Sell directly to a cash buyer. A direct buyer like Jerez Land underwrites the actual parcel — the real distance, sightlines, land use, and buyer pool for that specific tract — rather than applying a blanket "neighboring project = devalued" assumption the research doesn't clearly support. We absorb the marketing time, the carrying cost, and the resale risk of finding the right buyer for a parcel some retail shoppers will hesitate on, and we put a firm written number on your specific property.

Request a no-obligation cash offer and we'll evaluate your parcel — including its actual relationship to the neighboring project, not a generic assumption about what "near a solar farm" means. There are no commissions or listing fees, and we move on our own timeline rather than waiting for a retail buyer to get comfortable with the view.

If your parcel is recreational or off-grid, our guide on selling recreational or off-grid land with no utilities covers the marketing angle for that buyer pool specifically. For production ground, see selling farmland, selling hunting land, and selling timberland. And if you're trying to get a general read on what your land is worth before you decide anything, start with how much is my land worth. For more guides on selling land in situations that aren't simple, visit our blog.

Frequently Asked Questions

They just put up a solar farm across the road from my 30 acres, and now I can't get a showing — is my land worth less?

Not necessarily, based on the published research. The largest study of vacant and agricultural land specifically (a 2025 PNAS paper by Virginia Tech researchers analyzing 68,000 agricultural transactions near 3,699 solar sites) found land values within 2 miles of a solar project rose about 19.4% on average, driven by buyers pricing in the land's own future lease potential — not a devaluation. Residential home studies do show small, inconsistent price effects near solar (roughly 1.5% to 5.8% depending on the state, per LBNL's six-state study), but your 30 acres isn't a home, and no large study has isolated vacant recreational or unimproved land the way it has agricultural land. If showings have stalled, the more likely explanation is buyer hesitation and assumption — a marketing problem you can address — rather than a proven value loss.

A wind farm went up a mile from my hunting land and I'm worried buyers will assume it ruined the hunting — how do I handle that?

Address it directly rather than hoping buyers don't notice. Wind turbines are visible for miles — Texas A&M AgriLife research cited by the Texas Real Estate Research Center puts turbine visibility at roughly 8.7 miles — so assume prospective buyers will see them regardless of what you disclose. What the large-sample research shows is that measurable price effects on nearby homes are concentrated within about 1–2 miles and fade sharply with distance and time (LBNL's 34-state wind study found the effect shrinks to a statistically insignificant ~2% within nine years of a project's announcement). For a hunting buyer specifically, lead your marketing with what's unchanged — cover, water, terrain, game sign — and be candid about what's visible from which part of the property so a serious buyer isn't surprised on a site visit.

I inherited land next to a proposed wind project that hasn't been built yet — should I sell now, before construction, or wait until it's finished?

There's a case for either, and the deciding factor is usually your own timeline and risk tolerance, not the research. Studies of built projects (both the LBNL wind study and the 2024 PNAS viewshed study) show any price effect is largest in the announcement and early-construction period and fades once the project is operating — meaning buyers touring your land during active construction (heavy equipment, temporary roads, truck traffic) may see it at its most disruptive moment. If you can afford to hold until construction wraps, the visual and traffic disruption that spooks buyers today will likely have eased. If you need to sell now, a direct cash buyer who underwrites the actual project timeline and distance — rather than assuming the worst — can move without waiting on that window.

Do I have to tell a buyer about the wind or solar farm next door when I sell my land?

Disclosure duties for conditions on a neighboring property vary significantly by state, so this is a question for your closing attorney or your state's real estate commission rather than a one-size-fits-all answer. As a general concept, many states require sellers to disclose "material facts" — information that would reasonably affect a buyer's decision or the price they'd offer — and a visible, operating energy project near the property line can qualify as one, according to guidance like NC REALTORS' material-facts explainer. At the same time, courts in some states have held that sellers aren't obligated to disclose conditions strictly on someone else's land, particularly if it's discoverable through public records or a site visit. Given that split, the safest practice regardless of your state is to disclose what's visible and confirmable rather than relying on a technical argument that you didn't have to.

My land backs up to a solar array that's already fully built and operating — does that make it harder to sell to anyone, or just certain buyers?

Based on the research, it depends heavily on what your land is used for and who buys that kind of land. The PNAS agricultural-land study found no reduction (and actually an increase) in nearby agricultural/vacant land value once you're outside about 2 miles, and the effect fades even inside that radius outside of specific conditions. Buyers who value land for production — row crops, timber — are largely indifferent to a neighboring solar array because it doesn't change what the land produces. Buyers who value land for its view or sense of seclusion — someone shopping for a homesite or recreational retreat — are the ones most likely to hesitate, which narrows that particular slice of your buyer pool without necessarily lowering what the land is provably worth to a production buyer or a cash buyer who isn't shopping for a view.

I've seen people online say a solar or wind project next door tanks land value by a huge percentage — is that true, or is it exaggerated?

It's generally exaggerated relative to what the published research supports, especially for land like yours. Online anecdotes — forum posts, secondhand stories — describe individual sellers' experiences, not controlled studies, and they tend to spread the most dramatic outcomes rather than the average one. The actual peer-reviewed literature on solar shows effects ranging from no statistically significant impact at all (three of six states in LBNL's solar study) up to roughly 5–6% for nearby homes in a handful of states — and the one large study of vacant/agricultural land specifically found values went up near solar, not down. Wind research shows a similar pattern: an average viewshed effect of about 1.12% nationally (2024 PNAS study), with larger short-term effects concentrated within about a mile or two of a project that fade within several years. None of the credible research supports a sweeping, universal, large-percentage devaluation claim for vacant land.

---

Disclaimer: This article is for informational purposes only and does not constitute legal, financial, or professional advice. Research findings cited are summarized from the named studies and may not apply to your specific property, state, or market. Laws and regulations vary by jurisdiction and change over time. Always consult a licensed real estate attorney before making decisions about disclosures, listings, or property transactions. Jerez Land is not responsible for actions taken based on this information.