Ground leases occupy a strange corner of commercial real estate. The land trades separately from the improvements on top of it, the lease terms run 50-99 years, and most of the compelling opportunities never hit a broker's desk. If you want to acquire a fee-simple ground lease position or structure a new ground lease on land you've identified, you need to find the underlying landowner before anyone else does.

This post covers how to do that systematically, using owner-direct sourcing tactics that most net lease buyers never think to apply to raw land and ground lease positions.

Why Ground Leases Require a Different Sourcing Approach

When most brokers think "NNN acquisition," they picture a QSR pad, a dollar store, or a pharmacy on a long-term lease. Those deals are liquid and well-brokered. Ground leases are different in three important ways.

First, the ownership structure is split. You have a fee owner (the landowner) and a leasehold tenant (often the developer or operator). These can trade independently. Second, many long-term ground lessors are passive investors, family trusts, or institutional holdovers who receive ground rent checks and have no active reason to market their position. Third, the deal has to be structured from scratch in many cases, meaning you're not buying an existing investment so much as negotiating the framework for one.

That means sourcing ground lease targets is closer to sourcing vacant land than it is to sourcing stabilized net lease retail. You need to find the landowner, not a seller who has already decided to transact.

Building Your Target Universe

Start With Assessor Data, Not CoStar

CoStar and LoopNet list what's already been packaged for sale. To find ground lease landowners before a deal is structured, you need to start at the assessor's office or a data aggregator that pulls directly from county records.

Filter for parcels where:

The land value is high relative to the improvement value (or improvements are minimal)
The ownership entity differs from the occupying business at that address
The parcel sits in a high-traffic retail or mixed-use corridor
The deed has not transferred in 15 or more years

That last filter is especially useful. Long-tenured landowners who have held a parcel through multiple market cycles are exactly the kind of passive holders who might be open to a ground lease conversation, either monetizing via sale-leaseback of the land or structuring a new ground lease with a development partner.

Cross-Reference With Recorded Ground Leases

Many counties record ground lease memoranda separately from deeds. Pull a search in your target market for recorded ground lease instruments over the past 20-30 years. This tells you two things: which landowners have already demonstrated willingness to ground lease their land, and which tenants or operators are active users of the structure in your market.

Once you have a list of existing ground lessor entities, map their other holdings. A family LLC that ground-leased one parcel to a fast food chain in 2003 may own three other parcels in the same metro where a similar structure could be proposed.

Use Skip-Tracing to Get Past the LLC

The most common obstacle in owner-direct land sourcing is entity ownership. The parcel shows up in the assessor records under "Ridgeway Land Holdings LLC" with a registered agent address in Delaware. That's a dead end if you stop there.

Skip-tracing tools built for commercial real estate (CRE Finder pulls this data directly) can pierce the LLC layer and return the beneficial owners with phone numbers and mailing addresses. For ground lease sourcing specifically, you want to identify:

The managing member or trustee of the entity
Any individual linked to the entity via state formation records
Secondary contact data including cell phones, not just the registered agent

A ground lessor who has been collecting the same rent check since 1998 is not monitoring their email. A direct phone call or a personally addressed letter gets a response when a generic mailer does not.

Outreach Tactics That Work for Landowners

Frame the Conversation Around Income, Not a Sale

Many landowners who would reject a purchase offer will engage on a ground lease restructure or a new ground lease arrangement because it preserves their ownership and increases their income. Lead with that framing.

Your outreach should position you as a developer or investor looking to structure a long-term ground lease, not as a buyer trying to acquire the parcel. The distinction matters. You are asking them to become your ground lessor, which is a fundamentally passive and ongoing role.

Direct Mail Still Works Here

For this asset class specifically, direct mail outperforms digital outreach. Landowners with 40-year holds are not checking LinkedIn messages. A well-written letter on real paper, addressed to the actual person (not "owner/operator"), explaining the ground lease concept and your interest in their specific parcel, will get read.

Send to the assessor address and, if skip-tracing surfaces a home address, send there too. Follow up with a phone call 10-14 days after the mailer drops.

Sequence Your Follow-Up

Ground lease sourcing timelines are long. Most landowners need multiple touches over 6-18 months before they're ready to have a serious conversation. Build a sequence:

Initial letter with concept overview
Follow-up call two weeks later
Second mailer at 60 days referencing a comparable deal in the market
Periodic check-ins every 90 days thereafter

CRM discipline matters here. Tag every ground lease target separately from your standard acquisition pipeline so you can run targeted follow-up without it getting buried.

What to Do When They Respond

When a landowner responds, your first goal is education, not negotiation. Most landowners outside major metros have never been approached for a ground lease specifically. Walk them through the structure: you lease the land, you or a tenant builds on it, they collect rent with built-in escalations, they get the improvements back at expiration.

Have a simple one-page explainer ready. Keep the language plain. Bring in legal counsel early but do not let the deal die in a term sheet before the landowner even understands what they're agreeing to.

The Sourcing Edge Is in the Data

Most NNN buyers are chasing the same brokered inventory. Ground lease positions, especially land under operating businesses where the ownership has separated from the leasehold, represent a less competitive acquisition environment precisely because the sourcing work is harder.

Owner-direct land sourcing with proper skip-tracing and a structured outreach sequence gives you access to a deal pipeline that most operators never see. The tools exist. The data is public. The edge goes to whoever does the work first.

Triple-Net Ground Lease Sourcing: How to Find Landowners Before