Field notes
Guides and honest answers about buying raw land, living on it, and making the most of your acreage. No jargon, no pressure, just what we would tell a friend.
Articles tagged buying raw land. 7 articles.
Raw land can be entirely real, entirely titled and entirely taxed current, and still be a parcel you cannot legally drive to or get a septic permit on. Five questions catch almost all of it, four of them are free, and all five are answerable before you send a dollar.
Three ways to turn a parcel back into money, and they trade off against each other in a way nobody spells out: the more you want for it, the longer you wait and the more of the work you do yourself. Including where a cash buyer like us fits, and where we do not.
Two different things are called a soil test and confusing them costs real money. One tells you what to put on the garden. The other decides whether you can ever legally live on the parcel. Here is how to tell them apart and which to pay for first.
Every land site tells you the same three things and most of them are selling something. Here is what USDA, the FDIC and four Federal Reserve banks actually publish about rural land values, including the year one region went negative and the decade values fell by a third.
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.
An earlier version of this article told readers they were protected if somebody else owned the minerals under their land. The state regulators say close to the opposite. Here is what the mineral estate actually entitles its owner to do, and the free afternoon at the county that settles the question.
Land is one of the few things you can hand down that cannot be wired anywhere. It is also one where the difference between giving it now and leaving it later is measured in tens of thousands of dollars, and where four cousins on one deed can end in a forced sale.
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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