Where Can You Buy a House on an Acre Near Columbus? 517 for Sale

517 houses on an acre or more are for sale across the seven counties around Columbus right now. That is 13 percent of the 3,865 single family houses on the market. The median one is listed at $699,999, and where they sit is lopsided enough that the county you search decides whether you have 153 to look at or 17.

I pulled every active single family listing in Franklin, Delaware, Licking, Fairfield, Union, Pickaway and Madison counties and sorted it by lot size. Houses that are already under contract are left out, because you cannot buy those.

How Many Houses Near Columbus Sit on an Acre or More?

	Listings	Median ask	Median size	Median year built
Less than an acre	3,256	$374,900	1,831 sq ft	1976
One acre or more	517	$699,999	2,538 sq ft	1986

Source: Columbus and Central Ohio Regional MLS IDX feed, single family listings in Active status in seven counties, pulled October 5, 2026. Lot size is recorded on 3,773 of the 3,865 listings, and the other 92 are left out of both rows.

The asking price nearly doubles, and I want to be careful about why. The houses on land are bigger by about 700 square feet and newer by ten years at the median. So that $325,000 difference is paying for more house and a later build date along with the dirt. I cannot separate the three with listing data, and anybody who tells you an acre is worth a specific number off a table like this is guessing.

The median acreage listing sits on 2.85 acres.

Which Counties Have the Acreage?

County	Houses for sale	On an acre or more	Share	Median ask	Median lot
Licking	423	153	36%	$715,000	4.3 acres
Pickaway	167	47	28%	$649,900	3.6 acres
Union	235	51	22%	$610,000	3.1 acres
Delaware	563	114	20%	$831,500	2.1 acres
Fairfield	355	72	20%	$607,500	2.6 acres
Madison	92	17	18%	$580,000	4.3 acres
Franklin	2,030	63	3%	$765,000	2.1 acres

County is the county recorded on each listing.

Franklin County has more houses for sale than the other six combined and the smallest share of them on land. If you are searching inside the county and holding out for an acre, you are shopping 63 houses at a median of $765,000.

Licking County is the opposite. More than a third of what is for sale there has an acre or more, and the typical lot is over four acres. Delaware County gives you 114 to look at, but the lots are smaller, about two acres at the median, and the median ask is the highest on the list.

Which Towns Have the Most Houses on Land?

Town	County	On an acre or more	Of all for sale	Median ask	Median lot
Johnstown	Licking	38	75%	$1,034,950	3.3 acres
Newark	Licking	32	26%	$667,400	6.7 acres
Delaware	Delaware	28	14%	$897,450	2.0 acres
Sunbury	Delaware	27	33%	$699,900	2.0 acres
Lancaster	Fairfield	22	21%	$762,400	6.1 acres
Marysville	Union	20	22%	$649,950	4.7 acres
Powell	Delaware	18	16%	$1,022,500	1.6 acres
Plain City	Union, Madison	16	12%	$712,000	1.9 acres
Granville	Licking	16	53%	$847,500	2.9 acres
Pataskala	Licking	16	21%	$576,450	4.4 acres
Circleville	Pickaway	15	29%	$499,900	3.6 acres
Dublin	Franklin, Delaware	14	17%	$1,097,500	2.3 acres
Westerville	Delaware, Franklin	12	10%	$964,950	1.7 acres

Town is the mailing address on the listing, and a mailing address can cross a county line. Nine of the 12 Westerville acreage listings are in Delaware County, north of the Franklin County line.

Johnstown is the standout and the number needs context. Three quarters of what is for sale there is on acreage, and the median ask is over a million dollars. Johnstown sits next to the Intel site, and I read that inventory as its own market and not as the going price of a country house.

Sunbury is the one I would point a Westerville-area buyer to first. A third of what is for sale has an acre or more, the median ask is just under $700,000, and it is a short drive up the road.

What Does More Land Cost?

Lot size	Listings	Median ask	Median house size	Ask per sq ft of house
1 to 2 acres	178	$517,400	2,202 sq ft	$236
2 to 5 acres	141	$695,500	2,512 sq ft	$243
5 to 10 acres	114	$725,000	2,671 sq ft	$264
10 acres or more	84	$1,197,500	3,044 sq ft	$363

Look at the step from two-to-five acres to five-to-ten. The lot at least doubles and the median ask moves $29,500. Then look at ten and up, where it adds more than $470,000.

What that says is that between two and ten acres, buyers in this market are mostly paying for the house and the setting, and the extra ground comes along cheaply. Past ten acres you are into farms, estates and land with a future, and the house stops being the thing that sets the price.

For a buyer that is useful. If you want room and you were going to buy three acres, look at the six and seven acre listings too. They are not priced the way you would assume.

Can You Get an Acre Under $400,000?

Seventy five of the 517 are priced under $400,000. Twenty three are under $300,000. One hundred forty one are under $500,000.

So it exists, and it is about one acreage listing in seven. Twenty eight of those 75 are in Licking County. Union, Pickaway and Fairfield have ten each. Franklin has eight and Delaware seven.

Under $400,000 on land usually means one of three things. The house is older and needs systems. The lot is an acre and change on a county road and not five acres with a tree line. Or the well, the septic or the driveway is the reason it is priced there. All three are workable. You want to know which one you are looking at before you write the offer and not after the inspection.

What Should You Check Before You Buy Acreage?

This is where a house on land differs from a house in a subdivision, and most of it is underground or at the edge of the lot.

Water first. A lot of these properties are on a private well, so there is no city water bill and no city water guarantee either. Get the well tested for flow and for quality, and ask how old the pump and the pressure tank are.

Then the septic system. The county health department holds the permit record, which tells you the system's age, its type and how many bedrooms it was sized for. A four bedroom house on a system permitted for three is a conversation to have before you are under contract.

Then where the water goes when it rains. I grew up around residential construction. My dad, my grandpa, my uncle and my great-grandpa were builders, and I worked in it until I was twenty. When I walk a property like this I am looking for water. Which way the grade runs from the foundation, where the downspouts discharge, whether there is a low spot between the house and the outbuilding that holds water in April. On five acres there is more ground for water to cross before it reaches the house, and nobody engineered it the way a subdivision gets engineered. You still need a home inspection and I am not a home inspector, but I will tell you what I see.

Ask about the tax status of the land. Some acreage is enrolled in Ohio's Current Agricultural Use Value program, which taxes farmland on its agricultural value. To qualify, a parcel needs ten or more acres in commercial agricultural use, or under ten acres producing an average of at least $2,500 a year in gross income, according to Ohio State's Farm Office. If the seller has it and you will not be farming, the land comes out of the program and there is a recoupment charge. Ask the county auditor what that number would be on the specific parcel before you settle on a price.

And talk to your lender early. An acreage appraisal depends on comparable sales with similar land, and there are fewer of those than there are subdivision comps. Find out how your loan handles it before you fall for a property.

What About the Cabin Listings Farther Out?

If you run this same search across the whole MLS and not only the seven counties, the acreage count more than doubles, to 1,078. Hocking County is the biggest piece of the difference with 130. Logan alone has 65 houses on an acre or more for sale, and Rockbridge has 22 out of 25.

That is Hocking Hills cabin country. Many of those listings are sold as short-term rentals, and they are an hour or more from Columbus. If you are looking for a place to live and commute from, leave them out, which is what I did here. If you are looking for a rental cabin, that is a different analysis with different numbers.

What to Do With This

Decide the county before you decide the house. Licking gives you the most to choose from and the biggest lots. Delaware keeps you closest to the northern suburbs and charges for it. Fairfield, Union and Madison are where the median comes down.

If you are weighing a house on land against buying the land and building, I ran that comparison in buying land and then building in Central Ohio, and the things that go wrong on a raw parcel are in land buying mistakes in Columbus. For Delaware County specifically, see new construction against resale in Delaware County.

These are Active listings on October 5, 2026, and acreage does not come on the market at the pace subdivision houses do. Send me your price band, how far you are willing to drive and how much land you want, and I will pull the current list with the well, septic and tax status noted on each one, so you can see which of these are worth a Saturday.

You can also start from the Central Ohio search. If you are selling first, start with what your home would bring.

Thinking about buying or selling in Columbus? Let's talk. Contact Adam Geuy at Blacktree Realty.