Category
The questions worth asking before you sign, and the ones most people find out about afterward. Deeds and easements, access and surveys, what a zoning designation actually permits. This is the homework, written by people who do it on every parcel they buy.
What each flood zone actually means for a land buyer, why your zone no longer sets your premium, and the FEMA statistic that should change how you shop: nearly a third of flood claims come from outside the high-risk zones.
Legal access and physical access are two different things, and the gap between them is where buyers get burned. What the three kinds of access actually mean, what the fix really costs when nobody will publish a number, and the five checks to run before you sign.
Land without an address is not land without a record. How to identify any parcel from a map, a coordinate or a neighbor, what the county actually holds on it, and why the unclaimed property database everyone recommends will never find you land.
Most articles on this explain two legal doctrines and never answer the question you actually have: can you drill a well on this parcel. Here is the exempt well rule for all ten states we sell in, the two acreage thresholds that decide it, and how to check before you buy.
Fifty things to do with raw land, split by what works while you are still making payments and what waits for the deed. Including an honest accounting of which income ideas are real on forty acres and which ones are not.
On a lot of rural ground there is no zoning at all, and that is not the same as no rules. What actually governs your parcel, how to find it in an afternoon, and the four traps we have walked into ourselves.
An acre is 43,560 square feet, which is the least useful fact on the page. What matters is how much of it survives setbacks, a drainfield and a well separation circle, why a 40-acre parcel is often not 40 acres, and what the federal data really says about price.
How your name sits on the deed decides whether the land reaches your family smoothly or through a court. On owner financing you get the whole note period to decide. Here's every option, and what the rules look like state by state.
Your title policy insures that you own the parcel your deed describes. It takes an explicit exception for where that parcel sits, how big it is and what is encroaching on it. Here is which survey answers those questions, when you genuinely need one, and the comma in your deed that is worth 280 acres.
While you are here
Pima County, AZOcotillo, cholla and prickly pear crowd a raised, flat pad across the middle of this acre, the natural spot for a home with a view of the Tucson Mountains. It sits in Diamond Bell Ranch about 33 miles west of Tucson, at 3,297 feet where summers run a little milder. Cell service is strong, and the zoning lets you build when you're ready.
Putnam County, FLArea photosHoot Owl Road is paved and power runs right past the lot, which is more than most of this old Satsuma subdivision can say. It's a quarter acre in St. Johns River country, twelve minutes from Palatka and a short run to Dunn's Creek and Crescent Lake. The lot is mapped wetland and most of it sits in a FEMA flood zone, so it's priced for what it is today.
Hudspeth County, TXArea photosGuadalupe Peak, the highest point in Texas, sits about a half hour east of this ground, and the salt flats that set off a war in 1877 are closer than that. It's open desert outside Salt Flat, Texas, with no zoning and no HOA, so you can pitch a tent this weekend and build off-grid whenever you get around to it.
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