Building up a new plot is a substantial investment in time and should be reflected in the value a plot has when buying/selling.
At the moment there is no way to know if your buying a fresh plot or a efficient and carefully laid out plot with hundreds of hours invested already able to pump out fuel.
You should be able to quickly see when browsing plots how developed they are. I'm sure they havnt implemented anything yet because it would be a fair bit of work to do.
A quick and easy solution would be to give land a power level displayable on the market place directly on the land image.
One way to allocate the power level would be to add the levels of each building on the plot together. This would quickly tell you how well developed the plot is.
This could work very similarly to the planned Illuvial power level