Rural land listing website, your thoughts on my plan?

[CGM]

A new project I may undertake is a rural land listing website. Its a competitive market, yes. But I was wanting to develop a site to cater to those who want to sell land and acreage in the united states.

Initially, I forsee a lot of work. My game plan was to search most of the major craigslist pages for major cities and contact individuals on there who are selling land and property (no houses, but basically rural land), and seeing if they'd like to have their land listed for free on my site. I need a lot to build content.

Afterward, people could buy premium listings for a very cheap price, say $5 gets you a premium listing on the main page and top listings in that area.

Then, what happens when I have 1,000s of listings when some of them have been sold already, and I may not know about it? I search for land a lot, and I see the same land listed on multiple sites sometimes. Sometimes its says "Sold" on one, yet available on the other. Any ideas on solutions for this? I was thinking of sending out a news letter every 3 months asking those who have submitted a listing to please update their listing on my site, as I surely won't have the time to check each and every one individually.

I have a good domain name that says EXACTLY what I offer, which can't hurt

Thoughts? Advice?

EDIT: I guess I should elaborate more on my plan.

Phase one: Build site, create content by offering listing to those I seek on Craigslist
Phase two: Advertise on forums specific to country living, and things of that nature. Try to develop good ranking in search engines.

Phase three: Do the first two phases and plan phase three accordingly to whats going on/needs to be going on.

[Charger]

I think at first you should start concentrating on a specific region (like South West)
Also, you should start with a more budget website.

[DerekS]

A lot of sites like this exist already, but they never seem to go anywhere. The idea isn't bad, but with resources like REALTOR.COM and the like, you have a lot of competition.

Without spending major dollars on a nationwide ad campaign, you run the risk of ending up like many of the other sites that never get more than a few listings.

If the site was very graphically involved, with A LOT of data/info (ie public access to tax records, assessors maps, perc/well info, etc) then you may win on your merits alone (ie people will use the site simply because it is so comprehensive.)

This would probably require more leg work on your part than it would be worth when offering a low listing price.